Optimal hardware for AE

[jaym19159714]

So even trying to do a 1/16th resolution playback preview is painful on either my systems.  Nothing too hard-core, C4D layer, few adjustments, some camera stuff.  Does any hardware or cpu and gpu make this more bearable or is this the nature of AE.

Next, with rendering, im already leveraging the power of 3 PCs in my house to minimize rendering times.  It does help but even the newer ryzen PC is only about twice as fast as my 13 year old FX based PC.

Does having the fastest PC known to man really help that much with AE or am I better off building smaller render nodes.  It seems there limits to AE regardless of the hardware.  I've even tried cloud computing and a 24 core xeon with 2 nvidia Cuda cards and 224gb ram wasn't scales faster than my current system I'm playing with.

[Martin_Ritter]

For any hardware recommendation, read the benchmarks from Pugetsystems:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/all_articles.php?query=after+effects

Also check RenderGarden, RenderBoss or BG Renderer, but be adviced that all if them will need large amounts of RAM.

*Martin

[Mylenium]

Exactly. There are limits. AE is barely multithreaded, GPU-acceleration is almost non-existing and forget about things like fancy asynchronous parallel processing. All it wants is beastly single-core performance. Refer to the gigazillions "How to optimize performance?" threads here and elsewhere where I and others have explained this ad nauseum. You can't force AE to do anything with hardware, it's about working smart and oiptimizing your projects to render as efficiently as possible, including investing in third-party plug-ins to substitute stuff that simply sucks in AE.

Mylenium

[Rick Gerard]

Visual effects artists and cell animators have a lot in common. To check for timing, framing, and composition animators run Pencil Tests. Just the outlines are photographed or rendered and when the scene works the project moves to Ink and Paint. A few "Hero Frames" are carefully painted and checked for accuracy. 3D Artists use the same techniques. Low poly models and rigged and animated with nothing but basic textures to get the scene working. That is their version of a Pencil Test. When the scene works they move on to the shading and all of the other things that are required to finalize the project by carefully setting up a few hero frames. Both of these workflows do not involve real-time previews with everything turned on. 

After Effects can be very efficient if you adopt the same idea. I always work with a Pencil Test first. No motion blur, no frame blending, limited effects, no depth of field. When the shot works, it's time for Ink and Paint. I turn on everything, ramp up the particle systems, add lighting, and I check a few Hero Frames. Occasionally I will ram preview a second or two, but I never try and run ram previews of complex composites or animations before I send the comp to Render Garden to render the comp because I don't have time to wait for previews and I already know that the Pencil Test, the staging, framing, and timing, are ok, and I know that the Ink and Paint are good because I looked at every pixel in the hero frames. While Render Garden is churning out a render I am moving on to the pencil tests for the next shot.

Even if AE's previews and render times improved dramatically, I would still work this way. Instead of previewing at final quality, I would add more to the scene to make it better, which would increase render time, which would slow down my work if I got hung up on previewing everything.