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Why Is AE Ram Hungry?
Hey guys, recently I’ve been playing around with non commercial versions of houdini (especially Halo, the compositing part of the app) and eyeon’s fusion, and I just can’t help but wonder how smoother these apps run, even on my old machine. I’m not badmouthing AE at all, hey it’s probably my fav. app, but I’m just enquirring about it’s ram and cpu needs, because I can run the other two apps mentioned above just fine. Anyways, maybe I’m way off in comparing the applications system needs but I was just wonderring, thanks in advance.
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8 Replies
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Yes, AE has its issues, but consider the following:
– Fusion caches mostly to disk, AE is generally first going for RAM
– Fusion creates proxies/ downsamples footage on the fly and uses them without the user noticing it, AE will always use full res if you don’t do anything to create proxies etc.
– While Fusion may not need as much RAM, it is terribly GPU (graphics card) dependent. If you don’t have a good card, you loose many of the benefits of using it.
– Fusion has a tile-based renderer, which does not require to always load the entire image but only parts.With all that, you may realise that the inner workings of Fusion are quite different leading to a different user experience. It is rather unlikely that AE will be changed that radically, but I’m sure they are already thinking of ways to improve the situation.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Thanks for answerring that Mylenium, I had a feeling you would jump into the question since I know you’ve had experience with a variety of apps (in 3d at least). And just one small little question, does the node or layer based procedure have anything to do with the cpu/ram usage?
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No, nodes do not per se speed up things. If any, the only gains come from the fact that unless you assign a certain node to present its output in the viewer (or one of it’s downstream nodes), there’s no need to calculate the image buffers and thus very little RAM is used. If you worked blindly, it would probably be so little, you wouldn’t even notice ;O).
Still, the most benefits are really gained by the adpative/ tile-based rendering (unlike in AE, they will never waste resources on empty areas or background segments that do not change for instance). I think another big point with AE is that there is a disk cache, but it is never really put to use other than for previews. Let’s keep our fingers crossed they realize that potential and the next version will make use of it.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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No, nodes do not per se speed up things. If any, the only gains come from the fact that unless you assign a certain node to present its output in the viewer (or one of it’s downstream nodes), there’s no need to calculate the image buffers and thus very little RAM is used. If you worked blindly, it would probably be so little, you wouldn’t even notice ;O).
Still, the most benefits are really gained by the adpative/ tile-based rendering (unlike in AE, they will never waste resources on empty areas or background segments that do not change for instance). I think another big point with AE is that there is a disk cache, but it is never really put to use other than for previews. Let’s keep our fingers crossed they realize that potential and the next version will make use of it.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Crazy Mylenium double posting on the forums :), thanks for the reply (ies), good to know. Who knows, maybe next time I’m working in fusion I’ll turn the viewport off until the final render haha 🙂
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[Mylenium] “Still, the most benefits are really gained by the adaptive/ tile-based rendering (unlike in AE, they will never waste resources on empty areas or background segments that do not change for instance).”
Hmm … so would this be beneficial during a cosmic zoom, for example?
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Yes. The result would be the same as when you split up a large image into multiple smaller comps manually and parent them together again. If you check this, you will notice that, although AE still seems somehow to care for them, parts outside the comp window that comprise entire “tiles” will not affect your rendering in a negative sense – just the opposite, they will be ignored and thus your render actually gets speedier the closer you zoom in to your final tile. This indicates that some smartness already is build into AE, now the only need to find a way to automate this tiling process without the user needing to intervene.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Thanks, Mylenium. I’ll take a closer look at that process.
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