Renders through AE and ME take extremely long / aerendercore not using all the cores

[ale.car]

I've received a Macbook Pro M1 Max from work. With it, i have been experiencing some extremely long render times, both when I render directly in After Effects or through Media Encoder.

When rendering and opening activity monitor, you can see that 'aerendercore' is not using all the available cores which then slows the render down.

My colleague who has the exact same model of the Macbook Pro can render things way quicker and the CPU percentage goes up to 800 on her pc. We have the identical settings for both programs and for the render itself. We are rendering the project in H.265.

I have been trying to find a solution, but I'm not really sure anymore what could cause the problem. I've tried reinstalling, changing power settings, giving full access to the storage of the pc. Is there anything else I can do to make the render be quicker?

PC Specs are the following if that helps:

16" Macbook Pro 

Apple M1 Max

64GB Ram

Thanks you

 

[jenkmeister]

For your colleague's machine, is it the exact same project you are rendering? AE will certainly attempt to use all cores, but some projects require limiting the multi-frame rendering for rendering correctness. 

What happens if you render directly in AE to say ProRes (use the High Quality preset)? Does the CPU usage go up? 

[ale.car]

Yes, me and my colleague are rendering the identical project. Both if I render through AE or ME it will not use more than those cores that i have added in the initial post. We also have the exact same settings both in AE and ME. Even the OS is pretty much the same.

Ive also tried multiple settings, rendering with maximum quality etc. It only really changes rendering times in making them even longer. Also when changing from H.265 to H.264 it doesnt make a real difference.

[jenkmeister]

The only thing I can think of is somehow the Multi-Frame Rendering checkbox is turned off on your machine. If you go into Preferences -> Memory & Performance, make sure those settings match. 

If that doesn't help, you could try dropping into Safe Mode (Preferences -> Startup & Repair -> Safe Mode) and then try rendering. That will temporarily set your preferences to defaults. 

[ale.car]

When starting AE in Safe Mode and sending it to ME to render, it definitely went up a bit. Its not as high as my colleague, but its definitely higher than what i have experienced. My colleague can get up to 800-900 in the % CPU, but this is better than my initial renders.

Maybe this helps in the context of saving the problem?

[ale.car]

@jenkmeister Hey there, havent heard back sadly. Dont know if my reply didnt count as one or how it worked, is my first time using the Support Community. The problem still remains after ive deleted some config files and reset the settings. Thanks 

[jenkmeister]

Without having the machine in front of me, understanding everything that is installed, what other apps are open at the same time, hard drive speeds, etc., it's really tough to debug the performance of the machine. You could try rendering directly to H.264 from within After Effects (instead of sending it to Media Encoder) and see if you get a faster render. 

[ale.car]

@jenkmeister I did try that but rendering through AE doesnt make it faster. Also both H.264 and H.265 dont really change the rendering times. As ive said, the weird thing is that my colleague has the exact same machiine down to the exact same hard drive. We are even rendering on a 10Gbit server and have the exact same way of connecting to that (also having the files locally doesnt change the speeds, shouldnt be the server aswell).

I wrote this post because this problem is absolutely stupid to solve and find out, what really is the problem. And i really dont get it sadly. Just makes it impossible for me to render things for our work since we sometimes have to have the finished products quickly.