AE 8.01 for Mac – open GL

[Craig Wall]

Update on my 36 hours of use:

It’s been fasters

And buggier.

I had a corrupted file last night–but because of my backups I only lost 30 minutes of work. Save/backup often!

[Kevin Camp]

i don’t have a preview problem, but if i choose to render with opengl in the render settings, the info pannel says opengl not supported, multiprocessing is off.

for the record, i have a 4-core macpro, ati x1900 (all opengl accelerated features supported)and multiprocessing is set to on.

so, at least for final rendering opengl does not seem to be supported on mac yet, and i can’t say i noticed much of an improvement in the preview speed (although i’ll probably test that soon).

do you think that the opengl ‘fix’ was only for the interface (i noticed that you can now enable hardware accelerated panels).

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Ronaldo Montalvo]

not sure if the open GL is really helping anything but i did notice that if you look at the info panel when you do a ram preview it always takes a couple of seconds before starting the preview render to re-save the project, each and every time you ram preview even if you just saved and even with auto save off. don’t think it did that before.

[Kevin Camp]

i did a little more testing…

i created a comp that would benefit heavily from opengl accelerated effects/features. the 8.0.1 update definitly adds opengl acceleration for previews and renders… if you have multiprocessing enabled, there is a slight pause prior to rendering or previewing, versus having multiprocessing off.

the message in the info panel was partly incorrect during a render (not preview) using opengl. opengl was being used (despite saying not supported), but multiprocessing was disabled in order to use opengl. i think the same process happens in preview renders, where multiprocessing is disabled, and the pause prior to render that i’m seeing is due to the disabling of multiprocessing.

so now the question will be to use opengl or to use multiprocessing…. it will depend largely on your system but also on your project.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Craig Wall]

Thanks Kevin.

It would be nice to get some official guidance from Adobe about this…

Again on my Quad Mac I am seeing more bugginess. A lot of hangs and one corrupt file. I wonder if this will only get really sorted out with Leopard and Apple’s next iteration of OpenGL.

No inside info here just my hunch.