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PI3 Performance Tips?
Taking some DV footage of a friend turning off a (PI3) created forcefield/fence, I started embellishing with other cool emitters in a single layer to show off PI3 capabilities.
I’ve now found however that in this scene PI3 freezes longh periods of time before returning user control, and although I have disabled particles, turned off particle display, turned off the video background, and pretty much anything else I can think of, the scene appears to keep grinding to a halt in edit mode.
I was of the belief that if I temporarily the emitters (in layers and preview) that this would allow me to continue working on the other effects until I needed to do the final render.
The scene consists of 8 Forcefield line emitters, a scanning/sweeping emitter, a couple of fire emitters, and an anamorphic streak emitter over a 580 frame 25fps PAL DV sequence. Is this pushing PI3 too much?
Could anyone offer tips for improving performance in such a situation please? I can see that I have plenty of available RAM, and the CPU % isn’t maxing out, but still trying to move between frames now (even with everything disabled) appears to make no or little difference.
PC P4 3.2Ghz, 2Gb RAM, Geforece 6800 256Mb – Win XP SP-2 latest drivers etc.
Should I be using multiple layers for the effects perhaps?
All suggestions appreciated!
Thanks
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4 Replies
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Turning off particle display will help for regular emitters, but if there are any super emitters in the scene, it won’t help much.
I’d suggest using “active” to turn off any emitters that are no longer visible. Also, make sure that you’re not using visibility or size to make an emitter stop creating particles. Use “number” or “active”.
Other than that, I’d suggest finding the one or two emitters that are creating most of the slowdown, rendering with them only, then loading the renders as the new bg footage (delete the emitters from the scene). Render in multiple passes.
Alan.
wondertouch -
Thanks Alan – I think you hit the nail on the head – it’s almost definitely the super-emitters…
From a compositional standpoint, the easy bit was overlaying the effects as my friend walks up behind the ‘forcefield’ to deactivate it, but once on the other side and he re-activates – it’s a whole lot harder to mask him moving over the emitters frame by frame … but such is the task i’ve set myself!
Thanks again and kind regards
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Render the emitters behind him alone with an alpha channel, then mask him without the emitters there, and put it all back together in the comp.
Alan.
wondertouch -
Thanks again Alan – I am following your advice on creating the SuperEmitters in a pre-composition, and it’s coming along nicely.
Thanks and credit to Aharon’s well timed CreativeCow tutorial on using AE7 Tracking info in PI3 too! (Hopefully PI will be able to natively import AE7 data in a future update?)
A question about blockers please – I have a fixed shape (head and shoulders) that ‘grow’ as they move diagonally across the screen and toward the camera.
I know I can centre drag and also rotate a blocker to animate it, but is there also a simple way to scale it too (I can’t seem to find one)?
Thanks in advance
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