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Best way to go faster?
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We’re doing processor-heavy work in a compositing app. NLEs allow us to do a few things (transitions and some effects) quickly because those few things have been designed to work quickly in a one-layer editing environment.
But just try stacking more than one of those effects on a clip in your NLE and boom — you have to render.
So that’s the price we pay with AE’s massive layering ability: render time.
Once they made cards that accelerated third-party effects. But the effects had to be programmed specifically for those cards. Then those cards became obsolete (slower than the computers’ processors). For that reason, I doubt we’ll see anything like that again on the desktop market — why make that kind of investment in hardware?
All we can do it wait for two things:
1. processors to get faster
2. AE’s OpenGL implementation to improve. But once we start adding effects, we’ll probably be back at #1, since OpenGL can’t accelerate everything.Or we could just buy what we can, and build the delays into our workflow, thankful that we can afford something this fast at this price, compared to the Discreet “big iron”:
“Manufacturers Suggested List Price for the Discreet visual effects systems are: inferno 5–$571,500; flame 8–$266,500; flint 8–$99,000. “
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[Jeff Memmer] “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.”
Even when my paycheck is dependent on it, I don’t like to wait. I recommend trying to pre-comp render intensive layers and pre-rendering them when possible. Try rendering overnight for the long ones (;
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Not knowing what you know/don’t know about computers and what contributes to speed, here’s some basic info:
– The mac pros have 4 processors vs. your current setup of 2.
– Mac pros support much more RAM than your current setup as well.
– AE CS3 can use all four cores of a Mac pro, provided that the machine has around 2GB RAM per core. This means 8GB+ is ideal. Apple-certified RAM can be purchased from third party companies like Other World Computing for 1/5th what Apple charges, making this a more reasonable option.
– When set to “multiprocessing” mode in prefs, AE CS3 on a mac pro quad (with 2GB RAM per CPU) will process four frames at once during RAM previews, which is essentially a 4X boost in speed.
– Mac pros feature the Core 2 Duo chip which is definitely superior to your current setup, and you will probably notice speed benefits JUST from the faster front side bus/ram speed etc. of the Mac pro.The above setup, a Mac Pro Quad with 8GB of Other World Computing RAM will cost you about $2800. You could probably sell your current machine for $1200 or so in today’s market, meaning you would need to come up with $1,600 or so to make the switch.
I would tend to disagree with the opinions here that there is no way to get noticeable speed increases, just by going to a Mac pro you are rendering 100% faster with AE CS3 due to having twice as many processors.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
actually, it would probably be faster than that… going from a 4-core g5 (2.5 ghz) to a 4-core mac pro (3.0 ghz) will render nearly 2x faster (based on some of the ae render benchmarks i’ve seen)… so going from a dual 2.5ghz g5 may be closer to 3x-4x faster on a newer 4-core mac pro… and around 6x-7x faster on an 8-core mac pro…
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
The above setup, a Mac Pro Quad with 8GB of Other World Computing RAM will cost you about $2800. You could probably sell your current machine for $1200 or so in today’s market, meaning you would need to come up with $1,600 or so to make the switch.
Okay. So, you say 2800. I need a decent video card (can’t use the one I have, right?) and internal drives are extra, bigger main drive is extra? Well, at least the last time I looked I was looking at 7 grand — true, I was looking at Apple RAM… You guys make it seem possible. Easy, even. I will check it out. Waiting on an influx of dough.
L.
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i wouldn’t say it’s easy to come up with $2,800 or even $1,600… not for me anyway…
but i don’t think you will need to spend money on an additional or upgraded graphics card for ae work, there is just not to much benefit in opengl within ae.
the drives that you may have in your g5 should work in the mac pro… they should be sata I drives and the mac pro should take them on it’s stata II bus, at least as storage drive. i don’t believe you can use them as boot drives (at least i had problems trying to create a bootable drive from an older sata I drive from an older system, but as an extra storage drive it’s fine).
the ram is spendy and i would say the minimum would be 1gb per core, and there are some rules to follow for upgrading…. there are 2 risers for ram, each with 4 ram slots. the ram has to be installed in matching pairs. that’s easy to remember, but then if you add ram you want to add more ram, you want it to be able to match the ram sizes in the respective slots on the other riser…. so if you have 2x512gb sticks in slots 1&2 on riserA, you want to add 2x512gb sticks in slots 1&2 on riserB to take advantage of the interleaving… so it starts getting complicated as you try to add more ram… just an fyi.
another concern would be any pci cards you have… i think your g5 has pci-x slots which are not compatible with the pcie slots in the mac pros. double check that, but if that is the case you would have to figure in the cost of any pci cards you have, like capture cards or sata (or scsi??) host adapters for external drive arrays.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Thanks, Kevin for all the info. You just answered all my questions. Next I have to ask the CalDigit people if they have a card that works for my external serial ata. L.
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You could always go the Hackintosh route to save lots of money if you really need to work on a Mac OS. They do run on x86 architecture! In a few weeks, Intel has the Q9000 series of quad cores coming out. 12MB L2 cache, 45nm die, support for SSE4 instruction (mostly beneficial for encoding, but its a big benefit at that!). DDR2 ram is insanely cheap, easy enough to find 8GB for less than $200. Seagate has some new 32MB buffered drives that are performing more like 10K Raptor drives. And if you would also like to run XP or Vista (or not vista 🙁 ) its not impossible to dual boot both OSX and Windows.
This is a great thread by the way, definitely going to start utilizing some of the setting in AE and pay more attention to preview settings. I’m definitely going to give Nucleo Pro a run. I’m looking at building a PC in the next couple weeks so I’m eager to finish a project I’ve started.
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