Rendering ram preview takes forever, even on high end computer

[Guest]

When I'm trying to preview my comp rendering the preview takes forever. It mostly renders about 1 fps, which with a 12 seconds comp adds up to 6 minutes of rendering, every time I make a change in my comp.

I'm on an i9 9900k computer with 64 GB of ram and a Radeon rx 5700xt, as well as a fast m2 drive. So the hardware shouldn't be the problem.

My comp is pretty complicated (some 4k material, both ProRes and H.264), and the renders have been slower and slower the more I have been adding. But it's not extremely complicated, not close to the complexity of a professional VFX artist's work.

It's also so stupid that the entire timeline has to be rendered again as soon as you make the slightest change, even if there's not a visual change in the comp (for example changing a mask without anything in it). Now I would say that I'm spending ~70% of my working time waiting for preview renders. It's not sustainable.

Is it like this for everyone? If so, how are people ok with spending the majority of their working time waiting?

I should also add that when I'm rendering, the CPU is on ~15% usage, and the GPU almost nothing. So I don't know what's bottlenecking. The only GPU acceleration available for me is the OpenGL (no metal). I don't know if that's something wrong, I'm on a Hackintosh system so it could some kind of issue with that.

[Mylenium]

I fail to see your point. You can easily "break" AE's hardware acceleration by applying a non-accelerated effect or stacking layers with blending modes that exhaust your shader pipeline's capabilities. Likewise, there's only so many streams your hardware may be able to decode in realtime. GPU acceleration is not a magic potion, at least not the way it's used in AE. Similarly AE does barely use any multithreading, let alone parallel processing, so running it on a Hackintosh that may not even correctly handle your core 9i's Turboboost likely isn't helping, either. At the very least you cannot expect it to use all cores. It never does. As to why the whole timeline needs to be re-rendered and the adpative caching doesn't kick in is a whole different matter, but without any actual info about teh comp we can't realyl tell. In any case, it seems to me that you simply have wrong expectations and a wrong concept of how AE works under the hood.

Mylenium

[Guest]

Thanks for the reply. I don't think the hardware acceleration is the main issue either. I'm not really sure which effects are using hardware acceleration, but I don't think the ones I'm using are doing it. 

I doubt that the fact that the system is a hackintosh would cause issues with CPU performance, I've used it in many CPU-intense programs and it has never been any problems. Also, my computer is set as a 2019 iMac (and has almost the exact same hardware), so if something is working on a 2019 iMac, it should work on mine too. I've read on other places about that AE only uses one core for rendering, which is honestly so stupid considering how much the performance could be improved if it had used all cores.

So if nothing is wrong and After effects is always this slow, the question would be: why is such a slow program the industry standard? I'm obviously a novice in AE and coming from NLE's such as Premiere and Avid Media composer, and I've understood that you shouldn't expect AE to work similarly as they do. But it's so strange that an industry standard program would be so unoptimized that it cannot even use multiple CPU cores. The employers of professional VFX artists cannot be ok with that such a huge part of their employees' paid work time is spent waiting for previews. Are other compositing programs, let's say Blackmagic Fusion and Nuke, equally bad?

[Mylenium]

Those employees run computers specifically tailored to AE use - boosted single or dual core with maximum per-core efficiency, i.e. what these days falls into the Core 7i or 5i category - or they simply use other programs like Nuke, Fusion and so on. The merits of "industry standards" is not worth debating beyond that nor is comparing AE to any other program. Does the poor performance suck? No doubt about it, but it doesn't help comparing compositing programs to editing suites, either. And of course you can grind Fusion and Nuke to halt just as well even with seemingly simple setups, they'll just behave bettr on a general level due to their node-based processing, scanline renderers and other optimizations. Still, such is the nature of any compositing. Unless you settle for canned effects like. e.g. OpenGL based particle systems, eventually you'll always come to a point where you're at the mercy of software-based rendering on your main CPU and that may suffer the same limitations as AE due to considerations liek temporal consistency and integrity or overall limitations of linear video processing.

Mylenium