CC 2017 being horribly slow

[Twainilicious]

Hello, i'm having the issue that my render times for a 3 minute 1080p 60fps video using the default AVI output settings takes up to 3 hours. Also the program itself is very unresponsive and previews of 20sec footage can take up to 10min. I never had this problem using an old Version of After Effects (CS6), but i had to update do to some new plugin features i needed. Now you're probably guessing my PC specs are too bad, but i dont think thats the case. I think i have a prtetty decent setup for a home PC:

CPU: Intel i7 7700K

GPU: GeForce GTX 1080

Disk: Adobe's Innstallation folder, footage. cache and output are on a 500GB M2 SDD (pretty fast)

Memory: 16GB DDR4

OS: Win10 x64

I know it could be alot better, but it also could be alot worse. I've informed myself online and people with the same CPU seem to have way WAY faster render times. I even tried to use GPU Acceleration, but it didn't change anything. I've read plenty on articles on how to imrpove the performance, but nothing really seemed to help.

I just cant work with having to wait 10sec till something updates in the composition window or having to wait 5min to preview 10sec of footage.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Additional Notes:

- I'm not running any CPU or GPU heavy programs, i'm only having After Effects (or Media Encoder running)

- Using Media Encoder or After Effect's Render Queue doesn't matter same result

- I'm on the latest AE CC 2017/AME CC 2017 Version

- When checking CPU usage while rendering it's only using 20% most of the time (couldn't find Multicore in Preferences)

[Mylenium]

Impossible to say. Aside from specific compatibility issues with one of your hardware components this could be anything. Siomply do a bit of debugging uisng resource monitor and other tools, check your event viewer logs and your device manager. From where I'm sitting I'd strongly suspect that something is up with your graphics card driver and also your SSD, pointing to a more generic PCI timing problem or the drivers running in quirks mode.

Mylenium

[ToolfarmJP]

Hello,

Are any plug-ins included in your projects? Have you updated them for Adobe CC?

[Twainilicious]

Yes, Trapcode Particular, Trapcode 3D Stroke, Sapphire Glow and Sapphire Shake. As far as i'm aware i checked for Updates a few days ago and it was up to date 😕

[ToolfarmJP]

Hello,

The version seems fine. Which render setting do you use, CPU, GPU, or Cinema4D?

[Twainilicious]

I tried CPU and GPU, but same result with both. Haven't tried Cinema4D since i tought that was an app and i dont own it nor use it so i thought that wasn't of use for me.

[Rick Gerard]

Render times depend on what is in your composition. I have had a lot of projects using things like Particular and some of the Sapphire plugins that take up to seven minutes a frame to render. That is my design limit. If I can render a frame in less than seven minutes I change something in the design so it will render faster.

Your render times could be completely normal for your machine. The way to figure out what is slowing things down is to select all layers, press uu to reveal everything you have modified and start turning off the fx on the most likely suspects. Render four or five frames and check the time and text again or just run a 4 of 5 frame ram preview. When you find the problem change some settings or see if there is a work around.

If you have projects that are complex and take a long time to render the best idea is to render an image sequence. If anything goes wrong or you need to fix a few frames or restart the render it's very easy to save all of the already rendered work.

Without a screenshot of your project with all modified properties of all layers and workflow and project details down to the last decimal point we can't point you to a solution.

[Twainilicious]

I figured it out, it's my expression in the Offset of the Trapcode 3D Stroke:

skeys = comp("Visualizer").layer("Sound Keys").effect("Sound Keys")("Output 2");

accum = 0;

f = timeToFrames(inPoint);

while (f < timeToFrames(time))

{

accum += skeys.valueAtTime(framesToTime(f));

f++;

}

time * 4 + accum

I'm trying to Sync it's movement to a beat. Maybe it's taking alot of computing power, if i only put time * 4 as offset it renders like 200 times faster. Any idea how i can shorten this expression or make it more "efficient" ?

[Rick Gerard]

You've got a recursive expression going there. It looks at every previous frame before it does anything. The expression basically says, where is the CTI, What is the value I'm supposed to be looking at, oh, it's the value from the previous frame calculated from the in point. Ok to to that I"m going to have to look at every frame and see how the values add up. Ok, now that I've done that it is time to move to the next frame and start all over.

Sometimes that is the only way to get a value. I don't have the time to dissect the expression right now and I'd probably need to know a little more about what you are trying to do. It looks like you want to move something a little more every time there beat.

A screenshot of the timeline with the modified properties of that layer would help a lot.

[Twainilicious]

The Layer is just a Solid i applied a 3D Stroke and 2 Glows onto. I only edited some of the Settings inside the 3D Stroke Effect. Besides from that Transform and Glow are untouched. The Expression belongs to the Offset of the 3D Stroke Layer.

The Stroke follows a Mask in a Loop and the Offset determines at which point it is at which time. Currently for testing the Expression is only "time * 4", but i want it to move steady and react t the beat of a song, meaning it speeds up using an output value. If i just add the Value to the offset like "time * 4 + value" it jumps forward and backwards, because the value doesnt remain the same. Therefor as u already dissected it correctly it calculates the value at any frame before the current frame and adds it up, so the offset is always correct and it's moving nicely without and interuptions.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Solve this yet, Twainilicious?

Cheers,

Kevin

[Twainilicious]

No.