Slow workflow between Ch and AE

[kjetils30485119]

Hi,

I am currently working on a scene in After effects in which I've got five scenes from Ch. Two of them with four charaters in it, and two with one.

Both applications are running.

They're about 30-60sec long, 1080p 25fps.

Whenever I want to preview something in AE after I've edited something, it often results in

1) the blue progress bar working endlessly to connect the dynamic link or

2) the blue loading icon working for many minutes + Ae status bar changes to "(Not responding)".

3) slow caching of preview in general.

Sometimes it works OK, but I don't think it is fast enough for daily production, as I am constantly waiting for previews after I've done something with the scene.

I have tried setting the preview to skip 2/5 frames, and setting the quality down to a quatert but it does not seem to work any faster.

Switching between fast draft and adaptive resolution doesn't help either.

I have also tried moving the cache folder to another disk, as well as with/without CUDA enabled in the project settings, and also w/wo CUDA enabled in the fast preview settings. Nothing helps.

Do you have any other suggestions as to what might help getting a smoother workflow?

My setup is

Dell Intel Xeon CPU e5-2609 V3 @ 1.90ghZ (dual) running Windows 10., 32gb ram

Quadro K5200 Nvidia card

[kjetils30485119]

Ok, I was about to capture my screen to show you what I mean, and changed the AE workspace from two to one monitor for ease while capturing the screen. This resulted in all of the unresponsiveness (blue cursor/progress bar delay/lag) I have been experiencing practically disappearing.

Could it be that simple - That my machine does not handle dual monitors? Or that my dual monitor setup has not been configured properly. Because this is a completely different world.

The video below shows a workflow I haven't had for a while - I added it anyway to show my preview render speed.

Dropbox - onemonitor-ok-slowrender.mp4

Then I tried changing scene. This "luckily" made the application lag again:

Dropbox - changescene-notresponding.mp4

This shows a bit of the unresponsiveness I am talking about.

However, now that I am only using one monitor, once I get past loading between scenes, the workflow seems much smoother. And by the way, once the Ch scenes in my example had loaded once, switching back and forth between my two scenes also works more smoothly.

[kjetils30485119]

Back to being frustrated. Started up another AE project with one Ch scene in it. It takes about 3 minutes before the dynamic link is up and running.

Dropbox - starting-up-3minutes-load.mp4

[oksamurai]

I think you're unfortunately running into the current constraints of CH dynamic link - 5 1080p 25fps 30-60 second scenes is a decent amount of data to transfer.

In my experience, dynamic link with AE is often the slowest the first time loading things up. For the latest tips video intro title, I had 26 dynamic linked characters, and often the initial load would take a while (and yes, skip frames and lower resolution helped tremendously). But after that it seemed to work pretty well. Now granted, those recordings were only 5-10 seconds apiece, so there was less recording data to sync.

We'll be continuing to work in future versions to make this better, but for now you may want to experiment with stuff like PNG sequence + WAV import instead of dynamic link for characters that you don't think are going to need to change much, viewing in the lowest resolution and most frame skipping possible, hiding comps/layers while working on others, etc.

I'll ask the team if they have any additional tips...

[hans anneveldt]

mmm, png sequence will not work here, got very frustrated this week while working on latest yofga movie.

the dynamic link is super slow cost me ours of waiting ... hope this gets better soon

grz hans

here you can see how many dynamic links i have in this comp : 27

[davidarbor]

Can you explain a little more why PNG sequences won't work for you? I recently stopped using Dynamic Link with Character Animator and I'm much happier. PNG sequences are pretty quick to export and any time it takes to re-export an updated version from CH is well worth it compared to the time it would take to preview a single pass in AE with a Dynamically Linked CH comp.

[alank99101739]

I agree with David - as much as possible I export from CH and import into AE rather than dynamic linking. I don't use PNG's however as on my poor little laptop I found using a video file with transparency (alpha) faster. I think my disk drive struggled to open so many individual files. A faster machine might not have the same problem.

[hans anneveldt]

Will try this next time, i am a little afraid for an other thing, i use the puppet tool also in AE in comb. with the CH, so i am afraid to lose the puppet link when i refresh the CH png sequense ..

[hans anneveldt]

Will try this next time, i am a little afraid for an other thing, i use the puppet tool also in AE in comb. with the CH, so i am afraid to lose the puppet link when i refresh the CH png sequense ..

[davidarbor]

The puppet effect lives on the layer, so as long as you're not removing the layer, but instead replacing the contents, you should be fine. It's easy enough to to a quick test to assure yourself, though. Duplicate one of your Dynamically Linked layers, import the PNG sequence, then replace that. If something goes wrong then you have the original left intact.

[hans anneveldt]

hi david,

did a small test and yep looks like this way off working, is the better way, the only neg, thing i see now that i get more wav. tracks, little bit afraid that, but i hace to be carefull with it..

tnx for the info / idea

grz hans