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Horrible performance with pIAE
I’m having severe performance issues with the particleIllusion plugin for After Effects CS5.5. I’m making a video for a client and he is interested in adding various effects to the video; particleIllusion seems like the ideal software for the kinds of effects we’re looking for, so I downloaded the trial plugin.
Everything works fine in the particle selection preview window – the effects play flawlessly in real time and follow the cursor with no lag. However, the in-composition performance is absolutely attrocious. In my 1920*1080 composition, a single pI effect on its own layer with no other active layers will take 5-30 seconds to initialize whenever I move the playhead backward or change any of the settings. This is rather bizarre considering that after the effect has initialized it renders in near real-time. If I have more than a couple other layers active, trying to add a pI layer slows AE so much the project becomes uneditable.
I have an i7 860 @ 2.8ghz, 12gb DDR3, and a GeForce GTX 460. I can render 8 layers of keyed 1080p footage with a dozen intensive effects per layer at about 1fps; why does pI take so damned long to process anything? Especially when it plays perfectly in real time in the pI particle selection preview.
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3 Replies
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I figured out the solution to this problem! I was making new adjustment layers, which filled the whole timeline, and then arbitrarily trimming the clip towards the middle. It turns out the later in the clip you put the playhead the more processing it has to do, as it basically processes the entire effect up to that point (even if the clip was trimmed) to determine the positions for the particles. So if anyone else has this problem, make sure you only trim off the END of the clip and have it start from its original start point.
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Glad you figured it out! Are you saying that adjusting the “in” point of the layer causes the slowdown, but if the layer starts at time 0 there is no slowdown?
Alan.
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Alan Lorence
Product Manager
GenArts, Inc.
http://www.genarts.com
http://www.wondertouch.com -
Alan,
Thanks. Yes, if for example you set the in point to 3:00 into the effect, it has to preprocess 3 minutes of particle effect just to know where all the particles will be for the first frame.
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