AE Preferences

[Kevin Camp]

i’ll assume you have 8 cores and cs4… in the memory & mp settings, you should probably leave at least .5gb of ram for other appliations, enable mp, min ram per core 1gb and you may want to leave 1 core for other apps…

if you work in hd, you may want to try setting the min ram per core to 2gb. this will reduce the number of aeselflink processes (the extra background render engines), but the other available cores will be used for other multithreaded tasks in ae. so if you were to look at the activity monitor during a render, you’d notice that those processes were often achieving better than 100% cpu usage, meaning the extra cores were being used.

since your media is on a separate drive bus, you might also enable disk caching (media & disk cache settigns) and choose a location on your main/boot drive, not the media drive.

there are other things that can improve performance in ae. avoid using footage that has been encoded with codecs that use temporal compression (also called interframe, p frame or b frame compression). common codecs that use that type of compression are hdv, mpeg-2, mpeg-4 and h.264. converting those to lossless animation, photo-jpeg or an image sequence will help ae out a lot…. even dv, dvcprohd or prores will work better in ae than hdv and the others mentioned.

also, if you have a lot of hd or high data-rate clips that are getting composited together, if they are coming from that firewire drive, the drive may be causing a significant bottleneck in data flow to the processors. when a render gets slow, look at the activity monitor (applications>utilities) and see what the aeselflink processes are doing. if they have low cpu usage, then that means they are not getting data fast enough to work efficiently, and that may be due to the data rate limits of firewire800. at that point you may want to consider external sata2 or sas raid solutions for your media drive.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Matluk]

Thanks a lot, I work in HDV and am trying different codecs to get the right results, So far Pro res from FCP has been working really well. My main problem was the memory and MP preferences in AE but you cleared that up nicely. In FCP can Pro Res import 4 channels of audio? I noticed when I import HDV using the pro res codec it goes straight to capturing without any options for audio channels. Also, I have a Blackmagic card and am just starting to run through all the codecs, anything in those settings that’s better than pro res for HDV video?

[Kevin Camp]

prores or dvcprohd are good compressed formats to work with in both ae and fcp. you’ll get good playback in fcp and little performance hits in ae. just be aware that those codecs are lossy, meaning that every time you render or export a piece of compressed footage to another compressed file (even if it is the same codec) you will be losing some image quality…

say you capture to prores in fcp, edit, export that to prores to work with it in ae, then render from ae back to prores to finish in fcp and then export the finished piece back to prores to create a dvd (which will then compress the piece to mpeg-2), you will have compressed parts of your project 5 times and may start to see some noticeable loss…

when possible you’d like to use a lossless or uncompressed codec as the intermediate codec to go between fcp and other software (like ae) then back to fcp. so a better workflow would be to capture with prores, export to lossless animation to work with in ae, render to prores for fcp. if the final is going to go to dvd, then exporting a lossless animation would be nice, but i think you can also take a project straight from fcp to dvd studio pro to avoid extra compression.

you may also be able to send reference quicktimes from fcp to ae to avoid having to export a new piece of media to work with in ae, that would avoid compression and save some time and drive space. i’m not familiar enough with fcp to tell you how to go about that.

as far as your decklink codecs, yes you probably have some very good codecs to use (uncompressed 8 and 10-bit, maybe 4:4:4 or 12-bit), but most of those may be too high of a data rate to capture onto firewire with out getting dropped frames. you should have a disk tester that came with your blackmagic software. copy that disk tester on your media drive and run it, it will tell you the frame rates of various frame sizes that your drive is capable of sustaining.

to capture uncompressed hd your probably looking at a 4-8 drive sata2 raid with a multichannel sata2/sas pci-e card… i think the minimum target data rate for uncompressed hd is around 320mbps. it sounds big and scary, but you can probably put the pci raid card, drive enclosure and drives together for around $1000 (maybe a bit more for a hardware raid)….

i’m not trying to say you should go uncompressed hd, i just went off on a tangent explaining it….

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW