CCSphere… still only single-threaded?

[Kevin Camp]

[David Gudelius] “I had the “render multiple frames simultaneously” option enabled.
CCSphere still uses only one thread here… hm.”

with mp enabled, and just cc sphere and the grid effect on a single layer and a few animated properties, i get pretty good usage of just about all cores (currently i have 6 cores running and 16gb of ram).

since i was getting such high performance with only 6 cpus, i figured cc sphere must be multi-threaded. so i disabled mp all together and rendered again. watching the activity monitor, i was getting over 900% cpu usage which would indicate that ae was using about 10 cores to render. so it is multi-threaded…

there may be a problem with your settings. are you monitoring the performance from the activity monitor or task manager?

i have a 2009 macrpo, 8 physical cores (with hyper-threading, ae sees 16 cores) and 16gb of ram. my normal preferences are: mp on, .5 gb min per cpu, longer preview-faster render is in the middle, leave 2gb of ram and 10 cpus for other apps.

you can try some similar settings on your machine, or just trash the prefs and see how ae handles it with the default settings, then build from there.

as far as cc force mb… it’s not as good as native mb largely due to native mb being adaptive — meaning if it needs lots of mb, then it creates more samples.

you can make cc force mb do the same, but you need to create an expression that links the number samples to the speed or velocity of an element that needs motion blur. then as that object move faster, cc force mb renders more samples, as it moves slower, then it renders fewer samples… but sometimes that’s not feasible.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Jens Enqvist]

As Kevin noted, CC Sphere is indeed multithreaded as are most of the CC effects.

Jens,
Cycore Systems

[David Gudelius]

This is so odd.
First of all, thank you very much for your hints…

Kevin, I’ll respond to your post later, because I’ve got a rendering running right now, and I’ll upload a screenshot with my actual settings.

Jens, I’ll upload a screencast of the activity monitor besides the AE rendering activity window, where you can see that when CCSphere is being computed, only one thread is being displayed as active.
I’ll post it in 2-3 hours.

Maybe my AE settings are that messed up that for CCSphere it isn’t even possible to use more than one thread. Or otherwise, the activity monitor displays wrong things.

Please be patient with me, I’ll post it in 2-3 hours when my actual rendering is done.
Thank you!

[David Gudelius]

Alright, here comes the screencast movie of the rendering process with the activity monitor.
I personally presume to notice there that every time CCSphere is being computed only one thread/core is active.
https://www.zentapher.com/ccforum/activity_ccsphere.mov

Besides, screenshots of my render settings:
https://www.zentapher.com/ccforum/screenshot_aesetting_01.gif
https://www.zentapher.com/ccforum/screenshot_aesetting_02.gif

Please excuse that stuff being displayed in german!

Thank you in advance,

David

[David Gudelius]

I forgot to tell you my exact system stats:

2008 Mac Pro, 2x3GHz Quad-Core, 12 GB 667 MHz DDR2-FB-DIMM RAM, Mac OS X 10.5.8

[Jens Enqvist]

Seems to be more than just CC Sphere going on there.

Try dropping a biggish sphere map, 8000 x 4000, in a new comp. Apply CC Sphere. Size the sphere to reach the bounds, animate y rotation and do a RAM preview. On our Macs, this maxes out the CPUs. If it doesn’t for you, try it with “MP” disabled.

[David Gudelius]

You’re absolutely right!

Disabling all effects but CCSphere only affects definately all cores/threads; both in RAM preview and rendering.

This is sooooo strange.

Now I will enable all filters step by step to figure out which one is single-threaded.

It seems like the process “Frame wird eingelesen” (“frame is being loaded” in english?) is causing the single-thread…

so please, please excuse me blaming CCSphere for this strange behavior!

[Jens Enqvist]

Glad to hear that CC’s got threads 🙂

[David Gudelius]

Hehe,

I came onto it because the activity monitor stucked exactly when CCSphere was being displayed as computed, as you can see in the former screencast movie.

But now everything is fine… thank you for your answers!

@Kevin:
If you read this, what do you recommend me to set up? I’ve got only 2 real processors and less RAM then you, so your personal setup might not being fully assigned to mine.

Thanks in advance!

[Kevin Camp]

the general formula is to leave 2-4gb of ram per core…

so you have 8 cores (4 on each cpu) and 12gb of ram.

you want to leave 1-2gb of ram for the system and any other apps (if you want to use some heavy apps often, like photoshop, you’ll probably want to increase that value, or decrease what those apps can use in their prefs).

so to start with, try leaving 2gb of ram and 3 cores for other apps. this should give you about 2gb per core for after effects. if you are watching the activity monitor and are stil seeing performance issues, try increasing the number of cores to leave for other apps to 4 or 5 to give more ram to each ae process.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW