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Best way to go faster?
I’m currently using a G5 dual 2.5 w 4.5 Gigs ram with an ATI Radeon 9800 XT video card, 2 Apple cinema displays, and running Quicktime 7.4.1 with OS 10.4.11.
I do a lot of effects-heavy 3D work. I’m using AE CS3 (8.0.2). Because I’m currently using mesh warp and bezier warp and Boris page turn (I’m animating “books” that fly through the air, pages flapping) I need to constantly see how this is working in real time). I need to do best quality rendering in previewing, because I can’t tell how things look when I do it with lower res or skipping frames.
Every time I need to look at one second’s worth of elaborate action in real time, I spend several minutes tapping my foot waiting for the little green line to fill. (those “trails” in Boris page turn are a monster time-eater). I REALLY want to look at 4 seconds worth, but that involves going away and doing something else. Then, if I want to alter one little glitch, I fix it, walk away, come back, check it out. If that didn’t work……. And so on.
So. Will a mac pro (intel) help? How much will it help? How much memory will After Effects really use? Is there anything I can do to speed things up while I’m saving my pennies?
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18 Replies
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In my opinion, you don’t need to see it full-res & full frame rate every time you tweak a setting.
Part of working with CG is compromising due to the hardware. In 3D apps, we work in wireframe when there are too many polys for OpenGL. We do a beauty preview still, then change the things that don’t require a full preview, such as animation pacing, positioning and so on. When it comes time to check the lighting, we use OpenGL or make a full preview.
In AE, unless the effect is out of position (or does other wrong things) at lower res, we can check the animation, rough positioning and a lot of other things with a low-res preview and skipping frames. Also, if you’re doing a lot of books with similar animation, do you really need to see all of them at full frame rate? Do the first one at full frame rate, then do the others by skipping frames at lower res. Save the full res, full frame preview for the very last preview.
In short, there’s no other way to speed up previews of what you’re doing on that machine.
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I’m running pretty much the same setup as you, except mine is a Quad and AE7, but I still go through the same hassles while working. After working in Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash for so long, it almost seems like something is wrong with AE when every little thing you do seems to take forever. But I’ve come to learn that’s just the way it is. It takes alot of processing power to make that stuff happen.
Working at half rez and skipping frames seems weird at first, but you just have to get used to it. Aside from what’s already been mentioned, you could also try turning off lights or certain effects after you know they are working like you want them. You could also turn off other layers that you aren’t working on at the moment. Another thing I found useful is to use the “region of interest” when checking smaller animations. That way it will only preview and render a certain part of the comp.
Most likely you don’t want to spend $500 on an extra program, but I’ve heard nothing but praises about Nucleo Pro. Version 1 is available for $50 but I don’t know what the differences are. Hang in there, we all have to deal with it! 🙂
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hey, thanks all. I’ve done the cropping thing and reducing size, etc. BUT, in my sad experience, a lower res and skipped frames both leave unrevealed serious problems which only show at a full res render. So, what I’ve been doing is full res renders, then taking notes, going in, fixing, full res render, etc. I think nucleo pro is what I’m going to try next — at least I can render in the background, which is better than going outside and chewing the foliage. Meanwhile, how much benefit might I get if I go into hock and get an intel machine?
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[Laurie Pepper] “hey, thanks all. I’ve done the cropping thing and reducing size, etc. BUT, in my sad experience, a lower res and skipped frames both leave unrevealed serious problems which only show at a full res render. So, what I’ve been doing is full res renders, then taking notes, going in, fixing, full res render, etc.”
I’ve had to do this with projects in the past that used complicated expressions linking between compositions… Sometimes the expression would ‘forget’ to update and the layer would jump to another location on screen.
My recommendation is that you do your renders as PSD sequences… This way you will only need to render out a small minority of trouble frames later on down the road. Import your PSD sequence into AE to preview it in full motion, and render out to lossless (or do whatever it is you need to do) when you’ve got a sequence that is working for you.
Worked for me and saved me major headaches!
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
[Dave LaRonde] “and you’d have to persuade ’em to run AE. “
Or you’d have to persuade AE to run on them! I don’t know which is worse =O
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
i have to agree (to some degree) that no matter how fast your system can go, at some point, you’ll want it to go faster…
and i’m sure that you can get this project done with your current system faster than if you stop now, buy a new system, do all the installing and upgrading of other components and migrate your project over to the new system just to finish it.
but you should also know that both steve and dave have 8-core mac pros, and it would be a noticeable speed jump if you upgraded to one. here is a benchmark comparison between and 8-core mac pro and several other macs including a 4-core 2.5ghz g5… the 8-core mac pro is nearly 3.5 times faster than the quad g5 in the ae test, that may equate to around 6-7 times faster than your dual g5.
you don’t need a high end graphics card for ae or new monitors (you may need adapters if they have adc connectors, those used to be $100), you will need new ram (pretty pricey). you would have to check if you need to upgrade any other devices you have, like capture cards, host adapters, etc. but if you have been considering upgrading for a while and your extra hardware will work and you’ll still be able to feed your family if you spend a few grand, it may be worth upgrading to a new system.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
[Darby Edelen] “My recommendation is that you do your renders as PSD sequences… This way you will only need to render out a small minority of trouble frames later on down the road. “
Hear, hear!
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Oh, thanks!!!! I’m very grateful for the benchmark comparisons. They are meaningful, and, if a couple little ships come in, I may be able to spring for bigger/faster. Meanwhile, I’m going to follow advice here, including, especially, My recommendation is that you do your renders as PSD sequences… This way you will only need to render out a small minority of trouble frames later on down the road. Import your PSD sequence into AE to preview it in full motion, and render out to lossless (or do whatever it is you need to do) when you’ve got a sequence that is working for you. .
Also, will go for nucleo pro, simply because if I actually CAN render in the background, at least I can keep working (I can, can’t I?). L. -
Just wanted to let y’all know. I’ve downloaded the nucleo demo and I’m rendering out PSD sequences, and it’s working really great. I’ll buy nucleo — which is a lot cheaper and lot less time consuming than a new computer. I’m very happy with all this. Thanks, thanks, all.
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This is one of the best threads I’ve seen in awhile. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a load of good stuff on this forum, but, man, I’m telling ya, this rendering speed deal is what really keeps me, as a novice, from doing a whole lot with AE and other pro to prosumer level software.
It’s amazingly cool how the prices have dropped and how easy it is to get a copy of pro software now – and even the learning curve is reduced by the web and all of the free information out there, including info on this website. But… it’s the rendering time for even the small stuff that’s such a killer.
I’m sure there’s a lot of others out there – weekend warriors who would love to do some more creative stuff, but hit that rendering barrier, where it’s just not worth the time to sit and wait – mainly because our paychecks aren’t dependent on it.
It’s great that we now have cheap storage capacity to do the projects, but it’s really going to be awesome when the processing power starts increasing again. Maybe in a few years we’ll see some of these often spoken of “breakthroughs” in computing actually hit the market and make our weekend fun a little more fun.
And if that’s the case, can you imagine how big sites like this will grow, because so many people will actually have the ability to share creative ideas that can turn more quickly into real projects…
I still have to check and make sure the hamsters are ok in my simple little HP.
Hey, but did you see Michael Bay talking about how with 3 robots in a scene, that it took them 38 hours to render one frame of film for Transformers:
It’s about 2:30 into the short video titled Transformers: Inside the Allspark.
And you KNOW that they had a good setup…
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