AE/Media Encoder: The best Workstation Configuration

[Todd Kopriva]

> If AE is called, then why wouldn’t AE use it’s typical resourcing (i.e. multi-thread) to render?

Because that would defeat the purpose of using AME as a background rendering application.

When you use Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing, you are telling After Effects to start many instances of itself in the background to render frames. This will take over your machine, and that is a good thing. You do _not_ want that to happen when you are rendering something in the background and continuing work on another composition, which is the workflow that rendering directly through AME is intended for.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Bill Lake]

Todd- Can you point me to some documentation on this? I’d like to understand the technology on this better.

My goal is often to render to final file as quickly as possible, once the comp, or a set of comps is completed. I find that if I generate a series of comps in AE (without rendering) and then drag them all to the AME queue, that I complete the entire render phase more quickly than if I first rendered to an uncompressed file in AE and then re-encode with AME. The AME final render’s always are a higher quality (2 pass encoding) and much smaller file size. Now, my comps are not very complicated, so maybe that’s the reason. Most of mine are 2d motion graphics, character animation compositions, logo openers (3d and effects) and such.

Where can I find out exactly how this works, software-wise.

-BL

[Todd Kopriva]

> I find that if I generate a series of comps in AE (without rendering) and then drag them all to the AME queue, that I complete the entire render phase more quickly than if I first rendered to an uncompressed file in AE and then re-encode with AME.

Then you’re probably not using Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing.

Documentation on that feature is in After Effects Help:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/memory-storage1.html

See this page for resources about making After Effects work faster: https://adobe.ly/eV2zE7

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Marc Lindeman]

I like this answer, but having trouble looking for an updated list of best practices when buying an HP workstation for AE CC2015

And Are we not now into an HP Z820 for best performances and up-gradable builds

[Wallace Adrian d’alessio]

It is now 2016 and this issue is muddier than ever. Adobe lists and nVidia lists don’t match.

The Cards on the Adobe list for GTX are all obsolete ( as are many of the others listed)

But they are available on Amazon used. (!?)

There is a lot of change and conflicting info on AE use of any card. What was simple a few years ago is now a mine field.

DON’T buy a Quadro K2200 for After Effects in any case.
.

Adrian D\’Alessio aka; Fluxstringer

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[Jay Budzilowski]

I would also like an answer for 2016…preferably the best workstation/gpu (PC or Mac) for strictly encoding/transcoding with AME.

[Michael Trenton]

[Wallace Adrian D'Alessio] “It is now 2016 and this issue is muddier than ever. Adobe lists and nVidia lists don’t match.

The Cards on the Adobe list for GTX are all obsolete ( as are many of the others listed)

But they are available on Amazon used. (!?)

There is a lot of change and conflicting info on AE use of any card. What was simple a few years ago is now a mine field.

DON’T buy a Quadro K2200 for After Effects in any case.”

I’d also like to add DON’T buy Geforce GTX 1070 as this card is not supported in After Effects.
I made the mistake of buying a brand new GTX 1070 a couple of months ago to replace my five year old GTX 580 and speed up work in After Effects and Premiere Pro. Unfortunately the card is unsupported in AE and using it leads to error messages and causes AE to crash. In Premiere the card performs no better than my old GTX 580 (rendering speeds being virtually identical). Seems I’d be better off keeping my old graphics card instead, but I’m hoping Adobe will address this and add support for newer Geforce GTX cards soon.