After Effects ONLY USES 1 CORE for on fly render

[James Osbun]

Hi Chris,

It will depend on your computer. For me, AE is sketchy in terms of resource utilization. Granted, I am offering it a lot power and even when it takes just a little of it its not too slow. However, the BG Renderer is a good option for me because it was coded to essentially fill in those gaps if need be.

If you were rendering an image sequence as your final output, you could start multiple instances of BGR and each one would use more and more of your computers resources up to 100% and leap frog render frames. You cannot do that if you are rendering to video, obviously, but for me, I just upped the settings a little and one instance of BGR will use 90-100% of my power and blast through a render in 30 minutes that AE wanted 2.5 hours on.

I cannot promise anything to anyone else other than I am telling you the truth when it comes to my experience. Let me know if you have any other questions. Happy to offer up so good info.

[Walter Soyka]

[chris brett] “…… are you saying that if you use the bg renderer script AE renders comps at twice the speed ? !!! —– and if so is this a ‘definate’ please ?– ie has this been well enough scrutinised to be taken as a fact?”

I generally use BG Renderer, and it does generally render faster. I wouldn’t say 2x, but I’ve found that the After Effects command-line renderer (aerender, which is launched by BG Renderer) renders noticeably faster and exploits system resources more fully than the full GUI.

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

[Walter Soyka]

[James Osbun] “If you were rendering an image sequence as your final output, you could start multiple instances of BGR and each one would use more and more of your computers resources up to 100% and leap frog render frames. You cannot do that if you are rendering to video, obviously, but for me, I just upped the settings a little and one instance of BGR will use 90-100% of my power and blast through a render in 30 minutes that AE wanted 2.5 hours on.”

If you’re using multiprocessing, you should not have to manually launch BG Renderer multiple times. Also, rendering to image sequences with “Skip existing frames” can get pretty disk-intensive, so a fast disk with this workflow is a must.

As I said in my other post, aerender is generally faster than the Ae rendering from the full GUI, but the numbers you’re pointing out here strike me as atypical.

I’d suggest you contact Red Giant Software about this, as this could be a bug in Particular when rendering with the GUI versus rendering with aerender. The difference should not be this huge.

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

[Chris Brett]

Hi James / Walter

Thankyou both for these most useful replies — will take a look.

Best regards

Chris Brett

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[James Osbun]

Hi Walter,

Thanks for the input. I just spent an hour testing and have come to the following preliminary conclusion:

First and foremost the efficiency of Multiprocessing within After Effects varies greatly depending on what is happening within a comp. The same goes for the Background Renderer. At times the BGR is much more efficient, however, I just seemed to find a sweet spot for in-AE MP during this test I ran using a large jpg and effecting it with the Ball Action and Add Grain effects. The AE-based render was capable of using over 50% of my computer resources as seen here:

*Quick note: that middle render that I stopped after 9 minutes – it still had 18 more minutes to go and that was with MP turned off and not using BGR. So MP really killed ‘normal’ rendering by about 12x in this case.

That sweet spot MP render finished in just over 2 minutes, as opposed to around 5 for non-sweetspot Multi-processing settings and the Background Render. The BGR, however, is quite effective with plugins such as Trapcode. I will likely test more, but for now that is what I’ve got.

Cheers.