Face Tracking extremely slow?

[asimzb]

Hello experts..

                       Can someone please guide me about why the face tracking with detailed features is extremely slow (about 4-5 seconds per frame), and what particular hardware is responsible for this job? because I don't see any CPU usage more than 15% neither GPU usage. RAM is also fine. and i have M.2 nvme SSD.

so i can't see any reason why it should be slow.

The clip is 1080p only 30 seconds even i have tried with other formats and low resolutions also but i see the reason is within after effects not with the video clip.

I don't understand if this is only with my system or everyone has this slowness issue?

After all what specific hardware is needed to speed up this process?

My hardware is:

Asus X99 gaming board

Intel i7 6800K CPU

Nvidia GTX 1050TI GPU

Samsung 500GB M2 nvme SSD

Ballastix 32GB RAM

Adobe AE CC 2017

Win 7 64bit

Thanks.

[Mylenium]

Facetracking doesn't depend on any specific hardware safe the fastest processor you can find. There is nothing wrong. The process as such is simply slow due to the complex analyses.

Mylenium

[asimzb]

It uses only one CPU core  at 100% out of 12 cores, what causes it to not use all cpu cores, may be its with this version of AE cc 2017, I read somewhere that the option was available in earlier versions of AE that could force to use all cores simultaneously.

[Rick Gerard]

Since multi core processing has been developed AE has never been able to use all system resources to process a single frame of video. There used to be an option to render multiple frames simultaneously but that did not work unless your comp used a limited number of effects and features. It was very easy and common to create comps that took longer to process with that feature turned on. Most common video compressing codecs also did not support rendering multiple frames at the same time. They wanted the data one frame at a time. RMFS worked best when you rendered image sequences not video. It's the same way with network rendering. If you have that option image sequences are the way to go.

Adobe's current efforts seem to be focused on utilizing the GPU more than the CPU so I may be a while before all of the computer's processing power can be used. The problem is that a frame of video, even a 4K or 8K frame just is not very big and AE looks at and processes one frame at a time. It's pretty hard to fill up 12 cores with the data from one frame of video. That is an oversimplification of the problem but it gives you the idea. It's not an easy problem to solve and there's been some pain along the way.

[asimzb]

Hi Rick, Thanks for the info.

so there is no solution to speed up the tracking process or at least make it useful because even with a 15 seconds video It starts tracking 2-3 frames/second  but eventually slows down and finally the application stuck and crash or not responding, may be due to 32GB RAM is filled up. i can imagine it would need 5 terabytes of RAM and 5 years to process a video of 4-5 minutes.

That is sad, even Snapchat can utilize cellphone hardware more effectively and do face tracking, apply 3D objects in real-time.

[Rick Gerard]

15 seconds is an eternity for most visual effects shots. AE is slowing down and running out of resources because the shot is so long. Trim it to just the frames you are going  to use or break it up into 5 second sections and then assemble the data later.

Most of the people that I know that use AE professionally only work on the frames that are going to be used in the final movie. Most folks just starting out and most amateurs, which is the majority of AE users, spend a huge amount of time working on frames that will never be in the final edit.

BTW, snap chat is not doing the same kind of processing at all. It's just finding a simple t shape and looking at a couple of areas of contrast. Basically similar results but an entirely different process that is looking at a lot more data. Could AE be more efficient, sure, but you are comparing apples and oranges. the only similarity is that they are both round.

[asimzb]

i am able to trim the clip in 5 seconds and do tracking on individual clips but even than it also require to delete cache and memory after every clip tracking to ease it otherwise system get slower. but i can't figure out how to assemble those individual clips into a single slip with all the tracking data attached.

[Rick Gerard]

You should have keyframes. Press the u key to find them. Just start copying and pasting keyframes making sure the CTI is in the right place every time you paste. There should be nothing to it. If you start out with the mask, track the first 4 or 5 seconds, then split the clip at the last keyframe, purge and track again it should be easy.

I cut up long clips that need tracking all the time. This is especially useful when doing Camera Tracking. I just trim the multiple AE cameras to cover the part of the shot where the inserted graphics go. It is a lot more efficient in the long run.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi asimzb,

Sorry for this issue. Did you ever find a solution? Please let us know if you have or if you still need help.

Thanks,

Kevin

[rowand71390272]

Hi Kevin,

This is also an issue for me. It's terribly slow.

My question is; why does the After Effects Detailed Face Tracker process so utterly slowly when Character Animator can do this with many more tracking points in real time?

It would be very advantageous to have an option in After Effects for the same real time tracking capability that Character Animator has, along with the additional tracking points.

Currently I can't even use the Detailed Face Tracker in After Effects it's that slow.

Thanks,

Rowan

[russ42370200]

Hi, I'm having the same issue. For me the face tracker starts going almost realtime then it gradually slows to an unmanageable crawl. I think the same thing happens in the normal point tracker also.

I need to track 10-15mins of face movment, and this is not going to cut it. The only work around I can see at the moment is splitting the footage up into lots of small segments. But I'll then have to copy and paste all those keyframes into one timeline... I don't see why this would happen, surely it doesn't need to store previous video or keyframe data in memory? It would be great to see a fix for this!

[Szalam]

I've found with the regular tracker that if I pause the track when it starts getting slow and then start it back again, it's fast again. I haven't messed with the face tracker much, but try it and see if it does the same.

[Dimirti2228157372hc]

Same problem here 2022, AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, RTX 3080
1h of analysing 2 tracking points for 1 minute footage (Position & Rotation)
23 GB of RAM used, 8% CPU usage, 0% of GPU usage

[Dimirti2228157372hc]

No wonder. Ae uses only 2 - 4 CPU threads at once. That explains the 8% usage on a 24 thread processor. I guess we're runnig ancient software here.
Adobe pls fix.