Dreamcube017 wrote: I feel like it SHOULD move fast so that the VFX team can hurry and get done wht they need to get done. ESPECIALLY if I'm just using partical plugins and stuff. I wonder how AE would work if I had an i5 or i7 CPU with at least 4 HGz, 16 gigs of 1396 DDR3 RAM and an NVIDIA GTX 690. THEN will it be real time? Actually, particle effects are some of the slowest things to render. Think about it; it's having to animate hundreds of thousands or even millions of things at once. Okay, maybe you're not doing particle effects that are as complicated as mine, but still it's probably thousands of things at once. That's still a lot. No computer will be real time with After Effects for high end effects. There are basic things you can do (and even some simple particle effects) that will render close to real time on a higher-end machine. I have dual six-core Xeons in my work system with 48 GB of RAM and it's still slow on some of the particle effects I do. It's significantly better than the one I have at home though (single six-core processor, 36 GB of RAM). The problem is that you have no sense of perspective. It was only a few years ago that a render would take overnight whereas that same effect now renders in about ten minutes (and it even looks better). We have come a very long way in a very short amount of time. David_MB wrote: I don't expect it to playback a comp with a ton of layers and effects, but something simple like one chroma keyed video clip and a background should be able to be played back realtime without trouble. It would really speed up the workflow if it did. Perhaps exerpts from a post Rick Gerard made some time ago on another thread will help explain things to you: "Sony Vegas, Premiere Pro, Final Cut, Avid are all NLE's (Non Linear Editors) and they are specifically designed to playback a video stream. With any of them, if you stack enough layers or effects on the video, they will have to render a new video stream based on the pixel-based calculations for every pixel in the stack. This rendering, especially for HD sources or for complex plugins, will take a bit of time. After Effects, Flame, Fusion, Shake -- are all pixel-based image processing applications that act very much like Photoshop. They calculate the values of every pixel in every frame, come up with a new pixel, and then play those pixels back as a video stream. AE and all the other pixel-based compositing apps, always work internally with completely uncompressed pixel data. NLE's rely on codecs (and in some cases hardware) to playback the video. It's an entirely different way of working with moving images." If your workflow requires a real-time playback, use Premiere! It's got a great keyer (or two) in it. And it plays back a video stream without needing to calculate each pixel. If you need to do some more involved keying work, once you've done your edit, import your Premiere project into After Effects and do the keying there. This script can make things even easier. Note: the advice in this thread is from some very seasoned experts in the field. Mylenium, Rick Gerard, and Dave LaRonde have been working with After Effects for many years before I was - and I've been working in video for over a decade!
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