WHY AFTER EFFECTS STILLS SO SLOW IN THE NEW MAC PRO?

[duranduran]

I have the new mac pro with this settings:

3 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon E5

64 GB 1867 MHz DDR3 ECC

AMD FirePro D700 6144 MB

Software OS X 10.9.2

And the AE performs slower than in my old mac pro. I have set the preferences as seen on all those tutorials on this site, I have an SSD external disc for cache files, memory and multiprocessing settings correctly...and previews are very very slow, and I can not even render a single comp without waiting 10 minutes. I am very disappointed and frustrated with this situation...

Am I missing something?

[martinc13962311]

Just to link this all back to the original subject, this is genuinely the only way to get your new Mac Pro to work. For whatever reason, and there are many. After Effects does not take advantage of the power on newer Apple machines. Through extensive testing for 3 months in Fusion we have found massive advantages in compositing and applying effects especially. There is a learning curve if you have not used node based compositing before, but stick with it if you want any kind of return on the investment I'm sure you all made in your new macs. There will be people that stick with AE regardless of evidence, and probably down to the nature of their work and old habits also. All we can do is give clear evidence of issues we had and what we have done to improve our workflow, and get more from our macs.

I think it is largely futile to keep second guessing Adobe, or hoping for a timely fix to this long running saga. I believe if you look at the timings of when this thread was first started, Blackmagic bought Fusion and got a ported Mac beta to market. Have Adobe managed to substantially improve AE on a Mac in that time? You just have to go with your own gut instincts and what works best for you. Hopefully a few people at least will see this as a help to answer 'why is AE so slow on my new Mac Pro' question, and see it doesn't have to be that way.

[martinc13962311]

Also their is nothing wrong with the gpu's Apple now use. Poor quality programming from certain software manufactures that is not flexible enough to move with industry trends is the problem. Would games developers release a game that only works on a certain graphic card?

‌

[Herbert2001]

Yes, Fusion is great. Combine with any 3d application, and learn to fly!

And don't forget that BlackMagic Davinci Resolve is also free for up to 4k editing and colour grading (it is more or less the industry standard).

[jan_balance]

New Upadte has been released. Does it solve our Problem? Could anyone please do a test for us?

[EchoOut]

I'm continuing a benchmarking project I already had going between a Macbook Pro, a 2009 Mac Pro, a 2013 Mac Pro and a z820. I'm comparing CC 2014 with and without Multiprocessing, the previous CC 2015 and the one released yesterday. I'll report back soon.

[P.M.B]

If there's not much improvement have mercy...they've been hard at work on the sleek new interface

[Jonathan Lutjens]

Thanks, Echo! This would be great.

While I'm not impressed with AE's performance given how far hardware has advanced, I still consider it a very useful tool. And at the current price point it's hard to beat.

I certainly hope that the new version of 2015 marks the beginning of some serious steps forward for AE.

[EchoOut]

Okay, not the most scientific benchmarking, as I know there are tons of variables, but on 3 Macs and 1 PC I'm finding almost no change in render times across CC 2013, 14, and 15 on any Mac, but a nearly 300% jump in render speeds on my PC, from CC 2014 to 2015. Still though, none of these speeds come close to what I was getting with Multiprocessing turned on in CC 2014 on both OS platforms. That was about 400% faster.

That all being said, the hardware acceleration in 13.6 seems to have really helped. I'll test that too.

Bummer.

[Jonathan Lutjens]

Bummer indeed.

I'm running Yosemite on a hackintosh with a 10-core Xeon E5 that's overclocked to 3.08 GHz. 64GB of RAM and a GTX 980. 2 TB 4 SSD RAID 0, plus a 200 GB SSD cache drive.

I've found that when I boot up Windows 8.1, my render time (CC 2014) gets cut almost in half (using the AE Benchmark performance file by Equiloud). So, I guess that's probably a 70-80% speed up? Never was good at math.

That's a big speed boost for sure. But is it enough to switch over to Windows? I don't know. I've got years of archived projects that could potentially be a pain to access if I move to windows. After Effects has been a great tool for me and I've done both low-end as well as broadcast quality work with it. The preview/render times and some of the compositing issues are really the only major complaints I have.

Thanks again for running your tests!

[dissidently]

There's still no multi-processing support in the new 13.6 update of AE 2015.

This would be laughable if it wasn't such an incredibly sad indictment of Adobe's direction and management.

Some bugs and broken features is one thing, but that could be forgiven if the things that did work could be rendered quickly with the full processing power of a workstation and/or render farm.

Mind bending and infuriating, all at the same time.

EchoOut, if you get a chance, try to show the contrast between similar projects with Fusion vs AE. Fusion 8 is currently only available as a beta, free.

[martinc13962311]

You will love this one! Just spent over two hours with support looking into why After Effects 2014/2015 can't import large image sequences on a SAN in Os X 10.11.1. Apparently and this is straight from Customer Support... AE is not supported for network/SAN use on a Mac!!!!!!! Premiere and Photoshop can import large sequences with no issues and work over a SAN.... Just little old AE again!

If ever you needed evidence of what an utter pile of crap After Effects is, this is it! So I can only assume the AE team think only small one man crews use their software? Why would you just not steal the import function from Premiere???

More importantly when I mentioned this ongoing issue to certain management at Adobe, why did they not flag it as a known issue???

[Todd_Kopriva]

> Apparently and this is straight from Customer Support... AE is not supported for network/SAN use on a Mac!!

That is not correct.

The true statement would be that low-level technical support staff are told that it is not in their scope to provide support for this scenario; that is for higher-tier and enterprise support staff to deal with.

Our technical support staff should know how to escalate such issues correctly, so we do have a problem to solve there.

Yes, we know that we have performance issues on Mac OS on networks with image sequences; this is one our two highest priorities for our next update, which we're working on now. We have been isolating and digging into this area for the past few months.

[martinc13962311]

‌Thanks for the clarification Todd, although AE 2014-15/El Capitan have actually made the situation much worse. And if you buy new machines as we did recently you only get El Capitan. You guys need to pass this onto users and your support staff pretty sharpish. We have spent months and a lot of money trying to fix this!

I can't express how serious an issue this has become for us. We are migrating away from AE due to this one long running problem and the huge effect it has on workflow, but still have on going projects in AE for now. You literally can't use import or replace file and this has led to severe issues on delivering projects.

I honestly don't know how you guys expect to be taken seriously when problems like this just keep rearing their heads... Totally crazy!

P.s. Best of luck in your new career by the way, bet it will be nice not to have to listen to moaning twonks on here! All the best.

Cheers

[rlmilton]

Todd, what about the larger issue (and original focus of this post) of slow render times and under utilized hardware on Mac? 

orchardpost30 has been very vocal on this thread about the import issue. Fine.  But most of us that follow this thread do so because we want to know whether Adobe is ever going to address the poor performance on OSX...   Is that the other issue in your top two? 

If not... what IS Adobe's priority?  We really need to know if it's time to make that choice: switch platforms to Windows (which Adobe supports) or switch software to something that actually works well on OSX, and leverages all the power of our systems. 

Starting to feel strung along here... when will something be done? If it's not really going to happen soon, please just tell us so we can move on!

[Todd_Kopriva]

We are continuing to work on performance on all of the platforms on which After Effects is supported. That is the majority of the work that we have been doing for the past year, and it is a very large share of what we'll be doing in the coming year.

Yes, we acknowledge that there are performance issues that occur on newer Mac hardware and Mac OS software, and we are working to address those.

[rlmilton]

Todd, I appreciate the reassurance, thank you.  Hopefully it is soon...

[martinc13962311]

‌That reassured you? How long has this thread been running? They have been saying it will be fixed in the next year for nearly two years!!! Now apparently another year...

[Todd_Kopriva]

Martin, I said that we've been doing a lot of work in this area and will continue to do so. I've acknowledged that there are issues for us to work through and that they are our highest priorities. What more can we say?

[martinc13962311]

‌I believe I bought this up with Bill and yourself earlier this year Todd. Without sounding like a douche, I would have expected to be able to import files from a SAN 11 months after highlighting a very serious bug. Not for the problem to now have got twice as bad.

I know things come across a little harsh on here sometimes, but surely you can understand how disruptive just this issue alone can be to a studio? Let alone the wider performance issues, which I have a little more sympathy for as you are rebuilding the new code base for AE.

[martinc13962311]

‌I'm not sure how you can expect us not to be a little put out, when we only found out today that you guys knew about this issue all along! Dishonesty and a lack of openness about these problems is why users lose faith...

[rlmilton]

I agree with this... as condescending and arrogant as this guy is... I agree.

[martinc13962311]

‌And no offence you guys and Apple have form for work flow killing issues and AE... Network rendering Quicktimes not working for over two years ring any bells?

So without sounding rude... Find it very hard to believe in a timely fix on these mac performance issues.

[martinc13962311]

‌The import issue is an OS X only problem and directly links to the discussion on poor performance. What is worse than not being able to import your work? Beats poor playback and rendering if you can't even get your renders in the program. I'm sorry it doesn't effect one man bands or agree with your thought police standards.

Good to know you speak for everyone though...

[EchoOut]

Hey dissidently,

I've been pecking away at Fusion over the last week and need to dig in before I can recreate the things I do in AE with any level of competency. I've been using AE since 1998, am a freelance motion designer and college professor who teaches AE, so breaking out of that workflow is a little tough but I'm making progress. It looks like I have access to some Fusion online training so I'll see if I can't make some progress after classes end in the next few days.

Good suggestion!

[dissidently]

I'm having the same problem. Despite a long time familiarity with nodal thinking for building shaders and materials in 3ds Max and other 3D apps, the way nodes work in Fusion is a bit of a mind bender for me. It's different. And it (initially) feels at odds with how I think about time and layers in compositing.

Perhaps I'll get to intuitively think of nodal compositing, but I'm not there, yet.

However it's been enjoyable because it's fast (the software) even if my use of it is stunted and retarded by my lack of knowledge and understanding of how it actually comes together as a whole.