-
Ae 2017 multi-core?
I didn’t see it in the change notes. Is multi-core threaded rendering back in Ae in this revision?
-
14 Replies
-
Hi Dave,
I would be happy to sit down and talk with you if you are interested? We are overly concerned with our customers. After Effects really didn’t add much for sparkly this time. We didn’t add back MP because that was a non ideal way to speed up After Effects in the long term. We have spent the last years making After Effects truly multi threaded and are now taking advantage of the GPU. It isn’t yet as fast as comps that worked well with MP but it will overtake overall performance soon. Majority of the time in the last 2 – 3 years was based on re-architecture/performance and stability.
Let me know if you would like to have a quick chat.
Cheers
Dave
———————————————————————————————————
David McGavran, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Director of Engineering, Professional Audio and Video
——————————————————————————————————— -
David,
I would be delighted to hear about improvements in multithreading.
As a very long time user, I was sad to see that, while most apps I use now work MUCH faster on my new computer, there is little improvement in AE2017.
I just switched to windows in order to get a massive boost in rendering via GPU’s and C4D.
AE does not show well on the very latest, very fastest, hardware. Why is that?
Thanks,
Lance
-
Hi Dave,
I guess I feel just slightly differently than you about AE.
There does seem to be something weird and unsatisfying about the latest releases but I’m not sure that I could say that I feel like the software doesn’t perform its basic functions.
I’m not sure that it has become slower either, but it certainly hasn’t become faster.
Like you, my main desires are stability and speed (also for Premiere) but I am not seeing egregious instability, just weird things occasionally (like a frequent crash on quitting that didn’t hurt anything but didn’t help either).
You hit the nail on the head about half-baked features. For instance dynamic links…. I only had to be screwed by those a few times until they were dead to me. Now if I create an AE dynamic link in Premiere, I wait for it to show up in AE and then delete the one in Premiere. I talked to another editor and we both laughed when we realized that he uses the same workflow. Half-baked and depressingly slow–same for sending comps to Encoder.
I just switched to windows and worked late last night in AE with no crashes or strange behavior.
Multi-Core and GPU should be utilized soon or AE will seem even more outdated.
Lance
-
[Dave LaRonde] “My favorite Tale of Woe is that the newest version can’t import PNG files. A bug fix may have remedied it by now… but why on Earth was such a simple thing broken AT ALL?”
I am working with PNG constantly and no problems here on Windows. I am also in the forums constantly and haven’t seen a real discussion about a PNG import problem post in CC2017 or in any version for that matter. care to share what do you know about this bug? is it not working for you? because I have only seen 2 posts in Adobe Ae’s forum that reported a problem and both of the Ops have disappeared without telling if the issue was resolved or not. do you really think that if such a crucial file type was broken, we would not be hear about it from a vast magnitude of users?
it’s one thing to complain about the software (that has got serious issues to address and I spare no criticism here), but it’s another thing to misinform users across the boards. Team projects not working? who said it’s not working?
Roei Tzoref
After Effects Artist & Instructor
♫ Ae Blues Tutorials -
It’s just with no real multi-core capability OR GPU acceleration, the CC Video apps look pretty embarrassing and outdated. Hopefully we will see those speed increases soon.
I also use C4D Octane and, with my new machine, the speed increase is astonishing.
-
Just noticed this thread and the discussion of AE’s optimizations, and I would like to share some impressions. Hopefully someone in Adobe still reads this or is still interested in discussing this…
I remember when Adobe announced they would start working on making After Effects faster, the post Dave LaRonde refers to, which was written a few years back (2013 ?). At the same time Adobe removed the ability for us to render with multiple threads. After this, the only noticeable optimizations I can think of is a few of the effects converted to GPU effects, many of which wasn’t very slow to begin with (fast blur vs box blur, etc…) and the preview options have become better. Apart from that, After effects today is generally slower than it was years ago. And multi threaded systems still has only negative impacts on the responsiveness of the program, still!!I want to share some experiences I have had since then.
4 years back I owned a retina iMac, the i7 4 core top of the line first generation released. After Effects did “ok” on this machine. But I neeed more power for other programs, so I upgraded to a PC with 6 cores, overclocked to 4,4 GhZ and 128GB of 2400MhZ Ram and a blazingly fast SSD (960 Pro 2tb) and GTX 1080 GPU.
From my experience, this new machine had NO! impact on After Effects performance. Nothing rendered any faster, and the UI in general just felt slightly more laggy.
Then, this year, I invested in another machine, with the exact same internals, except a GTX 1080ti and a Threadripper 1950x CPU (16 cores) markedet as a super CPU for visual creators alike.
And to my disappointment, After Effects is now slower than EVER! Not only in rendering, but the general user experience and responsiveness is worse than I had before. So the more powerful machine I buy for multiple purposes, the slower adobe programs becomes – to an extremely noticeable degree.Additionally, the slower AE manages to update the preview frames, the more laggy the timeline scrubbing and UI behaves in general, which makes it feel even slower than it actually is. (this same goes for Premiere Pro)
These are the same findings that pugetsystems.com shows. They build custom cheaper computers for adobe programs (gamer riggs) compared to other art programs which actually are able to to utilize the modern day machines power.
I have made two videos, with the same scene opened on my to machines, which hopefully illustrate my point quite clearly.
This is a good comparison since the two machines are basically exactly the same, except for the CPU.
Specs: Ram: 128 gb at 2400MhZ, HDD: 2TB 960 Pro 3500/2100 MB/s Read/write, GPU: GTX 1080Ti/1080. Both CPUs are overclocked and runs in safe temperatures with no throttling.
I urge you to take a look and see the difference. The scene is fairly simple, mostly using a lot of circle shapes. and moving them with motion blur on. Both videos are recorded with the very latest CC 2018 which has GPU accellerated Motion Blur.Here is the 4.4ghz Intel CPU video:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mqqcm9ff9blfmck/AfterEffects_6core4.4Ghz.mp4?dl=0Here is the Threadripper CPU VIdeo:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lalh1gm0z0emxwe/AfterEffects_threadripper.mp4?dl=0-As you see, the 1950X does a horrible job in AE.
I would love to hear more about when and what plans Adobe has for this. I remember quite a few years back, when Todd Koppriva was Adobes spokesman, he actually went as far as to say that currently AE was not optimized for future systems. But the plans were to make huge optimizations and therefore a Mac Pro with many cores wasn’t optimal then, but if you want to plan for the future, then get a powerful system he said (hinting of great optimizations to come). This is so many years ago, that the machine you would buy then would probably all ready be out of date, so a really bad investment advice I would say. And AE still won’t benefit from any modern machines such as iMac Pro coming out now, or the new multi core CPU era that is upon us. But, will this ever change?? Or maybe Adobe should actively advice people to strafe away from these powerful machines?
Since AE started their optimization plans, which is a long time ago, we haven’t seen much improvements at all. And currently I’m considering getting a cheap game PC with high clock speeds only for AE, because it barely is usable on my new powerful machine…I have to stress that this impression only directs toward Adobe programs (AE, Premiere and Photoshop in my case). I use 3DS max, Unity 3D, and many other heavy duty programs on my Threadripper 1950x which doesn’t slow down at all and the UI reacts just as smooth as on low core machines, and which has amazing rendering results (both GPU and CPU). So this impression of degradation only relates to Adobe programs. And its important for me to emphasize that most benchmarks focus on rendering time, but the overall user interface responsiveness which is more difficult to measure with a number, is as badly optimized and part of the frustration.
I hope you Dave or any of the AE team reads this and has some recommendations or can enlighten us on what steps you are taking to improve any of this..This has been an ongoing discussion on the Adobe Hardware Discussion forums as well.
Sincerely
Joachim Barrum -
Oh I meant Dave, the other guy…David McGavran. He signed his post with Dave as well ☺ Probably he won’t read it, but I have no idea were to get some actual proper response from Adobe – and he seemed genuinely interested in discussing the matter. Adobe constantly say they take their customers extremely serious and that they make sure to squeeze every drop of computer power from your machine (from what I read in a recent adobe blog post)…which to me seems like a silly joke in the current state of AE.
AE has no bug report forum the way Photoshop does, even though Adobe Photoshop team isn’t good at listening to their customers seriously unless 1000 people screams at once, at least there’s a place where you can try to get in touch with some of those developing the software.
-
Couple of things I’d like to point out here.
The bug report form at Adobe’s web site here [link], if you fill it out correctly, goes directly to a member of the After Effects team. They aren’t likely to respond, but I can assure you that a member of the AE team will read it and will file it appropriately. (I’ve met the person whose job this is and they are very nice, so please don’t swear too much.)
As to performance, here are a different kinds of performance in software. In After Effects specifically, there are a couple of big ones: interaction and rendering. They require very different work.
In CC 2015, the AE team was working on making interaction with After Effects faster, not rendering. Now, there were a lot of bugs when it first released and it took them a couple of years to get those worked out! But now, in the current version, working with After Effects is much faster as far as the interface goes. The reason for this is because After Effects is actually multithreaded now (which it wasn’t before). The renderer and the UI run in different processor threads. This is a big deal. A while ago, I jumped back into an old (pre CC version of AE) and was struck by how much slower it was to work with. It felt very clunky compared to CC 2017 and CC 2018.
The problem is that separating the UI from the renderer doesn’t really speed the rendering up. It does, however, provide a foundation to build on to make it better in the future (theoretically). Now you can, for example, start GPU-accelerating various effects. I use Fractal Noise on every project and it is noticeably faster to use now – even on my crappy/old GPU!
Some of the newer things in AE are multithreaded now too (like the Camera Shake Deblur effect and the Cinema 4D renderer).
In a way, I’m glad the old render multiple frame simultaneously is gone because it was pretty buggy. You could get some ridiculous flickering with it. Also, the wrong expression or certain effects would be incompatible with it and it’d just revert to single core rendering a lot anyway. So, in many cases, and with many projects I’ve had, the new versions actually render faster.
HOWEVER, there are still a lot of cases where the older version with RMFS is faster.I know the AE team is working on making things faster. From what I’ve gathered, performance is the highest thing on their priority list. Still, every chance I get, I let them know that we just want things quicker. I know that something as fundamental as the rendering engine isn’t going to be redone overnight, but…I want faster to be here faster!
– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
-
With all respect Michael, you were conveying the exact same hopeful narrative 3 years ago…and also suggested that the subscription model wouldn’t slow AE’s development.
Years have passed. Nothing has changed.
At this point I think it’s an open question if Adobe will ever commit the development hours necessary to get things modernized. They seemingly have little financial incentive to do so…there are no indications of progress…and no roadmap has been communicated to give us hope.
Life is full of funny particles.
-
if adobe not having the money/resources to remove dolby in older versions and thus having to remove cc 2015 and older Entirely doesn’t shake your confidence in the subscription model, what will? the only bottom line is their bottom line.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up