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I
ip Edit
Known Participant
October 9, 2022
Question

What are the ideal Preferences, Project, Sequence Settings for an Apple M1 Max machine

  • October 9, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 399 views

I'm working a "particularly" complex dissolve animation in After Effects v22.6.0, this week.  I was led to believe the Apple M1 Max machines would be ideal for more complex & GPU intensive motion graphics.  However, I wasn't expecting my previews and/or renders becoming significantly slower than my previous 16-Core Intel Mac.  Common experience perhaps?  Answers, then?  I hope so.  Here are some of the details of the project:

 

UHD; 30fps

Adobe sRGB color space; 16-bit

Working with stills; mostly JPG, but some PNG files

The main effect causing delay seems to be the Trapcode Particular plug-in.  

The gist of this animation is to have a piece of paper dissolve away into 3d space.  I've created what are seen as close-ups on "pages from a book" via pre-comps with a few blending modes being used (e.g. overlay & multiply).  I’m introducing the Particular plug-in to dissolve the page away into “beads of ethereal light” (glorified glitter - hahaha).

 

It is no secret that Particular will cause delays in preview & render time.  And I’m sure it doesn’t help when adding a “glow” to the particles either.  However, I just want to make sure that - 

A)  my Comp Settings, Project Settings, Preferences Settings are ideally aligned for performance with this particular project

B)  my Comp Settings, Project Settings, Preferences Settings are ideally aligned for use with an Apple M1 Max machine (by implication,  perhaps I shouldn’t be approaching my settings now in the same way I did with a 16-core machine).  

 

Here are the specs on my Mac:

MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021)

Apple M1 Max

64 GB of memory

running Monterey (MacOS v12.6)

 

Also, attached screengrabs of my existing Preferences/Project/Composition Settings.  Hoping that helps.

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Mylenium
Mylenium
Legend
October 10, 2022

Color management is handled through the hardware accelerated pipeline, both in AE and at at the system level, so in theory it should not matter at all what settings you use. That does not preclude extra processing for 32bpc, log files custom LUTs/ profiles applied via effects etc. of course. Still, it should have a negligible impact. As for how and why the MX processors create virtual "cores" is a thing I haven't really considered yet, but it's realyl something I would only delve in if I had a Mac. It's probably something nobody should even worry about beyond including some standard code bits for the scheduler in his code and/ or use the proper compiler options.

 

Mylenium

Mylenium
Mylenium
Legend
October 9, 2022

There's simply a quadrizillion bugs on M1 Macs, both in OS X itself and in turn of course the Adobe programs and third-party plug-ins just pile on to that. The most important steps appear to be turning off multiframe rendering to avoid some memory leaks and truncating the disk caches to the bare minimum to prevent that weird thing where it never flushes and just fills until the whole disk is full. Those are of course just observations from my daily forum routine and those issues popping up ten times a day. I'm not a Mac guy.

 

Mylenium 

I
ip EditAuthor
Known Participant
October 9, 2022

I'm continually grateful for the speedy responses you give, Mylenium (especially when they're my inquiries - haha).  And frankly (at least in this circumstance) I could care less whether you're a Mackie, or Mac'r or Mac person(s).  Empirical data welcome, regardless.

That said, I did what you suggested.  The memory leaks which continue to confound me, are just so so so weird.  In spite of logic, I decreased the cached memory amount by 67%.  Of course caching is working better (b/c logic be damned, Macs just have to be different that way?).  However, I am noticing a slight up-tick in preview render time performance after having un-checked multi-frame rendering.  I imagine the fact that M1s are no longer "limited" to cores is a reason not to check it.  Perhaps there's a redundancy process happening there, which is unnecessary?  Gotta love how many ? marks there are here.

I also, played around with the Preview panel some.  Not necessarily helping with the particular work-horse, but when I uncheck Cache Before Playback, and check "If caching, play cached frames" it seems to help speed along some of the precomps.

Still looking for some more definitive answers on settings, which have proven to improve the performance on M1 Macs, but this is a good start.  Keep it coming, people.  Ae performance with M1s is an ever persistent issue, it seems.

Also, how do color settings affect/improve render times?  And given this project, would that have an impact?

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