For years the community has been asking for the EXR workflow to speed up and for years this community is still frustrated in Adobe's response to this. Yes, there have been some nice tweaks to how AE interperates the files, helping us shuffle the multichannels a little easier. But the speed in which files are played on the timeline is just rediculously slow, even when working with HD frames.
With more and more users leaning into 3D in their daily work, and wanting to have as much conrol over the final output of their imagery, the After Effects team needs to put a higher priority on this request. You would think that compositing exrs would move up on the list of requests since there has been such a big shift to integrate 3D into the Adobe ecosystem. If this needs to be formally asked for again, then I am asking that this push to the top of requests.
Also, we all know that there are other compositors out there like DaVinci Resolve 18( which you can get for FREE) that handle exrs much faster than AE, but its nice to keep things in one eco sysetem if possible. Please Adobe. Lets put a little more effort into areas that so many professionals lean on in their day to day work.
seconded. I use EXR's daily, and I've had to completely drop AE from my workflow because of it. It's basically been unchanged since CS6. ironically, EXR handling was faster in CS6 too... I can't imagine they'll do anything about this, because it's an image sequence, and optimizing image sequence nonsense would probably be a hack that breaks even more stuff, or require rewriting quite a bit of the I/O code, which in a program like AE is probably rather extensive. They took 5 years to remove and re-add mp4, remember.
Well. Its an idea but it felt like it fell more under the "issue" category this time around, in my opinion. If putting it in the "suggestions" box again would help, I would post something daily. But as this has been an uber-frustrating problem for years, just as nubnubbud seconded, I thought I would try posting here. If you can tell me who to tag to get this moved up the chain, I think that would most helpful. Thanks for the reply.
as he said, the sluggish response in reading EXR's is several times that of other image sequences, even in 1080p resolutions. EXR's are an industry standard, and store values as floats, which are a fast data type for modern computers and GPU's to calculate on the fly, even in other parts of the program, like the perlin noise generator. It uses the same stuff, WITHOUT needing to reference a lookup table and do vector math for each pixel.
It's got unexpectedly low performance, compared to other image types, even ones that are more complex and math-heavy. it's a bug, and after a decade with barely the addition of a new color space transform, the module for EXR's is seriously in need of maintainence.
Have you tried DWAB since we've had more control over it's settings in After Effects (since around September 2021)? Now when using EXR we can better balance file size and drive space with image quality. And, of course, what steps have you taken to optmizie performance in After Effects?
Yep. Optimizations have been made in AE. IF we need to talk about that sort of thing, then I will put it out there that the machine I have had issues with AE on is a 32 core, 64 thread, Threadripper with 128gb of ram. This gives us 4gb of ram per core. Double what AE recommends as a base. Also, it has dual 3090s, which dont really help me here, but just throwing those specs out there. DWAB and AA are good options and are used, but we are using different compressions for different kinds of jobs. Sometimes we are using half float ZIPs and other times we are using PIZ or RLE. DWA compressions can have color issues, which for us is a problem. So we are using it more sparingly. Do you know if the DWAA and AB are listed somewhere as the perfered EXR compression format for AE? I haven't seemed to locate any info in the documentation regarding this.
big 00f on the threadripper. you'd get basically the same performance on a 12900k.
but yeah, I think they just don't care about it. their interface for multilayer EXR's is totally from, like, 2008. Which is really freaking funny because it was introduced by Industrial Light and Magic and remains a de-facto standard alongside ACES for compositing.
I was curious how Resolve handles exr sequences and it is buttery smooth. I really don't understan why a company that earns billions of dollars has such crap software as AE.
ADOBE, could you get to work an fix the speed issue once and for all. This is so riduculos as even putting the latest CPU and GPU does not help at all. Working in AE feels like driving with handbrake on!
I cant see any impreovements. AE cant't play FullHD exr without caching it, same with other formats. I guess the whole software nedds to be rewritten from scratch.
This is exactly the issue AE has. A lot of formats play back redicolously slow. Even the mercury playback engine in Premiere is faster. But in complete contrast to this, I can play 4/5K RED RAW or ARRI RAW or ProRes in realtime even with basic grading and still scrub really fast back and forth like it's proxies when I'm in Resolve. There is little excuse in todays standards to have such poor decoding and playback performance. And it's not limited to EXRs.
Adobe still has miles to improve on that front. I would assume that can only be fixed by writing a new engine that can actually take true advantage of modern hardware/software. The ratio GPU/CPU usage in AE is still laughable while Resolve can fully utilize the GPU.
Maybe. Performance enhancements are always welcome, but I am good with a motion graphics/effects based app playing souce footage from RAM as if it's uncompressed at the Comp settings and bit depth of the project. In an NLE, I would expect different.
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