After Effects CS6 is slow on my Z800

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

12cores with 24GB of RAM is not an ideal rig for AE. You should also be explicit with what it is that you’re doing that makes AE slow. Then let us know your RAM settings in AE.

Cheers
RoRK

Intensive AE & Mocha Training in Singapore and Malaysia
Adobe ACE/ACI (version 7) & Imagineer Systems Inc Approved Mocha Trainer

[Walter Soyka]

[Roland R. Kahlenberg] “12cores with 24GB of RAM is not an ideal rig for AE”

That is to say, 12 cores with only 24 GB of RAM is not an ideal rig for AE. AE requires a lot of RAM in order to effectively use multiple cores. I have 48 GB in my 12-core Z800.

When Roland asks about AE’s RAM settings, he’s referring to Preferences > Memory and Multiprocessing.

I’ll add that the disk cache location can make a big difference to performance; I’ve got mine on a dedicated SSD.

However, before you start buying more stuff, let’s go through the basics. What sort of work are you doing? What kinds of footage and what kinds of effects? What exactly is slow — interactions? Renders? What’s your CPU and RAM utilization like during render? (Ctrl-Shift-Esc to open the Task Manager, then click the Performance tab.)

Have you reviewed the manual page on Improving 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

[Anhtu Vu]

I do mostly on-line and mixing/sound design for long form doc and independent film. I getting more and more advertising and motion graphics work and i do most of it in AE.

I just installed Adobe Production Premium and all the Preferences is still at default.

I just find preview and rendering painfully slow.

For example i’m working on a 60 second promo for a client. Footage came from a Sony HDV (forgot which one). He off-line in FCP, i transfered it to Premiere CS6 linking to the original HDV mov. Things are pretty snappy in PP. Exported all the clips to AE.
My comp is basicall a 3D cam, a few solids, 10 pre-comp where each pre-comp is a movie clip + some psd layers, stereo mix. When i render the final comp to DnxHD 220 mmbits…it took 30 min! Ouch!!

Doing preview while working is also slow. Suggestions ??

[Eric Santiago]

I want to blame the HDV clips but how about the PSD files?
what res are they? are they moving at all? motion blur?
Is your Quadro 4000 up to date with CUDA?
The rendering I can see since you are using a third-party such as Avids DNxHD, but are you sure you need 220? I use that all the time but thats with XDCAM and R3D clips straight into AMA.

[Walter Soyka]

[Anhtu Vu] “I just installed Adobe Production Premium and all the Preferences is still at default. I just find preview and rendering painfully slow. “

Enable multiprocessing. Set it to leave 8 GB for other applications, and set it to use a minimum allocation of 2 or 3 GB per CPU.

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

[Anhtu Vu]

Nah, HDV is not the problem as DnxHD and Prores are not any faster.

Yes all the 10 layers has motion blur and 3D enabled

My quadro 4000 does not have the latest driver as the Z800 is also running Avid Symphony 6 and i gave it priority driver wise since i spend way more time in Avid as opposed to AE

I always render to DnxHD 220 besides lower Mbits rate does not yield faster rendering time.

Well, it seems like there’s not much i can do after reading all the comments and suggestions. Maybe this “slowness” is normal AE behaviour.

[Anhtu Vu]

After enabling multiprocessing, no changes.

I’ll try the other suggestions and report back.

As i mentioned in one of my reply, maybe this is just normal AE behavior on a Z800 with 24 GB ram.
i just find it borderline unaceptable for pro work. I can’t see myself doing client supervised gigs if i have to sit around and wait for preview everytime i make chages.

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

With HD and motion blur, I’ll try setting aside only 3-4 cores for AE, with between 3GB to 4GB per core.

AE can be notoriously slow if you’re looking at matters from an NLE perspective. You do however know that lots of great work are done in AE – so, learn how to optimize your AE rig and learn how to speed up your workflows, previews and final renders.

HTH
RoRK

Intensive AE & Mocha Training in Singapore and Malaysia
Adobe ACE/ACI (version 7) & Imagineer Systems Inc Approved Mocha Trainer

[Walter Soyka]

[Anhtu Vu] “Yes all the 10 layers has motion blur and 3D enabled”

I just ran into this issue myself a couple minutes ago — perhaps you’re facing the same problem I did.

On a comp which contained a precomp with half a dozen vector layers, preview was glacially slow. It turns out that I had a pre-comp accidentally set to the Ray-Traced renderer instead of the Classic 3D renderer. Since I wasn’t using ray tracing, turning it back to Classic 3D got the render time right back where it should have been.

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

[Eric Santiago]

From the very beginning with Motion Design (for me), Ive always treated AE as the app that doesnt get client review. My understanding is that its for post-work or special effects.
I have never sat with a client to see what they think in AE.
Its 99% in NLE or media player.
I can bring down the fastest PC/Mac at my disposal with AE when delving into multiple layers that are far to large to deal with.
Most of the time its Vector from Illustrator/Freehand.
Check your PSD layers. What res are they at and ask yourself what res they should be.
Its hard to help when Im not actually in front of your system.
My specs are:
BOXX 8400s/8GBRAM/NVIDIA5000
MacPro 12core/32GBRAM/NVIDIA4000