Differences in Render Times--Mac OS Catalina vs Windows 10

Report · Dec 14, 2020

Hi,

I have some questions about render/export times for files coming out of After Effects--I'm not entirely certain whether to post in this forum or in a Media Encoder forum.

I'm exporting several multiple-screen virtual choir videos (14 singers each), 2D layers and no effects or movement, each about 3 minutes in length. There seems to be a massive discrepancy in processing times between files rendered/exported on MacOS and on the Windows-10 operating systems. (Video specs and computer stats below.)

One video exported on MacOS took 17 hours to complete.

My creative partner was able to export 7 (seven!) such videos in under 3 hours.

I can understand that an Intel i5 (in a Mac) vs an Intel i7 (in a Dell) processor might account for a difference of 20% or so, but I'm a little at a loss to account for a render time difference that is literally an order of magnitude, if not more. Parallel encoding is enabled on both machines, and all other settings appear to be maximized.

I've also noticed, at least anecdotally, that export times in Catalina have been considerably slower since I upgraded from Mojave three weeks ago. But I don't have firm stats on that because I haven't been making direct comparisons.

Has anyone noticed similar discrepancies in export times across the two platforms, and can you account for any differences? I've been working in the Apple ecosystem for years and I'm quite happy with it, but if these results hold, then I might need to look to a Windows-based machine, perhaps as a dedicated rendering machine. Thanks in advance for the help.

Video Stats

1280 x 720, Apple ProRes 422 LT, No Audio (will be done later in layback)

Computer Specs

MacOS Catalina: Late 2019 iMac; 3.7GHz 6-Core Intel i5; 64GB 2667MHz DDR4 Corsair Vengeance RAM; Radeon Pro Vega 48 8GB Graphics Card; 512GB SSD

Windows 10: Dell XPS 8930; 3.6GHz Intel 8-core i7-9700K; 64GB Crucial RAM; Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti Graphics Card; 1TB SSD

Report · Dec 14, 2020

I should say that my creative partner was working on a Dell running Windows 10.

Report · Dec 15, 2020

Start by disabling GPU acceleration. I'm pretty sure that you're making things more difficult by even attempting to use the crappy Mac graphics hardware in the sense that AE may constantly try to render the frames with GPU acceleration, then fails and falls back and renders in CPU mode, anyway. That extra stuff alone could account for a lot of extra render time, even more so since it's possible that AE may try this multiple times per frame.

Mylenium