After Effects performance

[Simone5E88]

Hi guys, 

I can't understand why after effects doesn't use all the workstation's resources .
I have a pretty powerful PC, with an excellent processor, a good video card and an SSD hard drive.

Where am I wrong?

Thank you 

[liamwpr]

I understand your feeling because I feel the same way unfortunately... I have a really powerful PC but my after effects is still so slow and laggy. How much RAM do you have? And how much RAM do you dedicate to AE? (You can see that in the preferences menu). 

Also try lowering the resolution of your preview to 1/4 or even 1/8 if you're working on a 4k project.

[Rick Gerard]

After Effects processes one frame at a time. A frame is only so big so it can't fill up all of the cores. Until there is a fundamental change in the basic architecture AE will continue to only utilize a portion of the power available. This is slowly improving, but it probably is not going to happen overnight because every effect, every 3rd party plug-in, every bit of software that decodes video formats will have to be upgraded to multi-core processing before After Effects utilizes all of the system's power. It's going to take longer because Adobe is only in charge of a small amount of that software.  

You can reduce render time significantly and use most of your machine's power for rendering with 3rd party background rendering solutions. I own several but my favorite is RenderGarden by Mekajiki. On my daily work station render times for most comps are cut by 75-80%. A comp that would take 10 seconds a frame to render now takes about 2.