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AE CS6 Glacially Slow; Can’t Seem To Resolve
I’m running CS6 on a PC built to DaVinci Resolve specs: 32 GBs of RAM, one Quadro 4000 card, two GTX 680 cards, an i7-3960 CPU overclocked to 4.3 GHz with project files on an SSD. To my mind, I should have no trouble running projects on AE yet even a simple project moves painfully slow; just trying to retype a text layer takes almost two minutes for a single word to show up once it’s been typed. The cursor blinks and then sometime later the new word pops up. As for trying to do anything more complex, forget it.
I have no problems with Photoshop (even huge files with many layers moves like butter) or Sony Vegas. Resolve also chews through HD video in realtime and spits out the chunks with no issues, it’s just AE that’s having problems. I’ve read tons of “this is why it’s slow” articles on Adobe’s site and watched enumerable “this is how you speed it up” videos but nothing has made a dent. I’ve turned MP off…I’ve turned it back on. I’ve played with different combinations of CPUs and mem allocations, made sure display values are set as low as possible and there’s zero change.
I know that every computer build is different but I’m hoping someone might have SOME idea.
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11 Replies
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Are you using the Classic 3D renderer, or the ray-tracing renderer? Hit Ctrl-K to open Composition Settings, then click on the advanced tab to see.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Thanks for jumping in. It only gives me the option of Advanced 3D.
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Are you sure that you’re using After Effects CS6?
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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Okay, Todd, I’m embarrassed and an idiot; it WASN’T CS6 but for some reason the project was launching an older version. 🙂
When I do launch CS6 now it moves a bit faster but still can’t even come close to real time and even the RAM preview is still pretty slow (but the text is much faster than before).
I checked the Render options and it was set to Classic 3D.
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[Scott Bruffey] “When I do launch CS6 now it moves a bit faster but still can’t even come close to real time and even the RAM preview is still pretty slow (but the text is much faster than before).”
Ae is almost never real-time.
Depending on what you’re RAM previewing, the time costs of launching background processes for multiprocessing may exceed the time savings of rendering multiple frames simultaneously. In these cases, it’s paradoxically better to disable multiprocessing while you work. After Effects CC has a feature which allows you to enable multiprocessing for render but not for RAM preview.
Have you seen the help page Improve performance[link]?
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Yeah, that was one of the first pages I went to and I learned some useful things about how AE works under the hood, but the changes they recommended didn’t seem to make any difference.
I respect that AE doesn’t really work in real time and I’m okay with that, but I see folks like Andrew Kramer on Video Co-Pilot scrubbing through a project in a tutorial and it seems that things are moving quite smoothly for them (that’s what I meant when I posted “…doesn’t come close to real time”. Poorly phrased on my part). I’m hoping to be able to get there. *sigh*
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> but I see folks like Andrew Kramer on Video Co-Pilot scrubbing through a project in a tutorial and it seems that things are moving quite smoothly
That is virtually always because they have cached frames to RAM before that step.
Because After Effects has a cache that keeps you from ever needing to re-render anything, simply practicing a tutorial once before recording it for real will ensure that you have smooth scrubbing the next time through.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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Okay, that makes sense to me. But it still seems that when changes are made to a project in the course of a tutorial, the project still moves more smoothly than I’m able to…I literally can’t scrub any faster than a frame a second with everything dialed down to the lowest possible display res.
And I greatly appreciate you folks stepping in to help me with this!
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What are you doing in this project?
Are you using features that are exceptionally computationally expensive, like depth of field, motion blur or time effects?
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Your bit depth might be a culprit too. I’m not sure if I’m the only that has this issue, but whenever I’m working in a Linear 32bit color space, the mere act of selecting a layer can take a couple seconds. Render and RAM preview times are not a problem, it’s like the GUI gets completely bogged down when I’m in linear 32bit mode. I’ve gotten to the point now where I do all my timing and non-color related tasks down in 8 bit mode then step it up to 32bits when I need to start adjusting colors. Otherwise just searching for effects, hitting the keyframe button, and renaming layers will take all day. I should also mention that this can be a spotty occurrence for me, at times I don’t have GUI speed issues in that mode, but I never have issues like that in 8bit mode, no matter how complicated the comp.
p.s. I’m on a Mac OSX 10.7 dual 4 core, 26GB RAM, Nvidia Qudaro 4000, and Adobe CC.
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