• Adobe After Effects

  Poor ProRes performance

  Posted by Dean Pickersgill on December 16, 2013 at 10:11 am

  Following the advices given by many on these pages which suggest I’ll see significant working/render speed improvements with ProRes footage I just spent 2 days converting my AVCHD into ProRes. I just want to report that I’m seeing absolutely no improvements in AE6, and in fact it’s taking longer to render this footage than with AVCHD.

  The only difference I see is that my activity monitor reports all my allocated memory is used (before the conversion it reported around 70% getting used), but AE6 ticks away in the background much slower, and foreground previews are a pain. Not only that but my panels are now annoyingly slow, and background rendering switches to foreground after managing to do 80 or so frames …

  Help anyone please … I’m sure I must be missing something but I’m buggered if I can see what!
  MAC PRO 8core
  64Gb RAM
  1TB 10,000RPM cache-disk
  memory set-aside: 15Gb
  CPU RAM allocation – 3gb, 8 CPU’s resereved (so 8 in use).

  Rgds Dean

  Walter Soyka replied 12 years, 5 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Walter Soyka

  December 16, 2013 at 3:16 pm

  [Dean Pickersgill] “Following the advices given by many on these pages which suggest I’ll see significant working/render speed improvements with ProRes footage I just spent 2 days converting my AVCHD into ProRes. I just want to report that I’m seeing absolutely no improvements in AE6, and in fact it’s taking longer to render this footage than with AVCHD.”

  By transcoding from ACVHD to ProRes, you are trading one problem (AVCHD decode is CPU-intensive) for another (ProRes decode is done in a 32-bit helper process and passed internally over your computer’s network stack to 64-bit Ae).

  That said…

  [Dean Pickersgill] “The only difference I see is that my activity monitor reports all my allocated memory is used (before the conversion it reported around 70% getting used), but AE6 ticks away in the background much slower, and foreground previews are a pain. Not only that but my panels are now annoyingly slow, and background rendering switches to foreground after managing to do 80 or so frames …”

  That sounds bad. Do you see this same behavior across Ae restarts and computer reboots? Have you tried clearing cache and resetting preferences?

  Walter Soyka
  Principal & Designer at Keen Live
  Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
  RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
  Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up