editing card for after effects

[Sam Moulton]

best for least money

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/sd/

$300 for 10bit, but it doesn’t do dv, which is ok because dv can come in by firewire.

now I really have to get off to work

[Steve Roberts]

Sorry, no card can speed up rendering. There used to be “Ice” accelerator cards available, but that was years ago, and they’re long obsolete. Can’t give ’em away.

However, Gridiron’s Nucleo software can make the best use of a multi-processor box. There are speed increases. Search the COW and the Gridiron site.

As for previewing, a good OpenGL card might help, but I haven’t done the research on that. If you search “after effects” and “OpenGL” via the COW and/or Google, you might find more info.

[Steve Roberts]

Keep in mind that this is strictly an I/O card. With respect to AE, it only allows you to preview your comp on a broadcast monitor. No acceleration.

… and it seems to be SDI only. If you don’t know what that means, it’s not the card for you. 🙂 Check other options on the site.

[Rai Pandudita]

Sorry, no card can speed up rendering.

thanks, i almost bought matrox rt.x100 today, luckily it was sold out everywhere. so now what should i do to make rendering and ram preview faster? aside from using Nucleo software. what hardware specification should i be using? i have a budget around 600 US dollars. right now i’m using pentium4 2.66gh with gigabyte motherboard and ati radeon x300 128mb graphic card. thanks for your help.

Rai

[Steve Roberts]

Get the fastest processors you can get. That’s the main thing for rendering speed.

More RAM won’t speed anything up, but will allow longer RAM previews and bigger comps and layers (image size & frame size). It will also allow you to keep other apps open at the same time. Keep in mind, AE cannot (currently) access more than 3 GB of RAM.

A faster hard drive (for projects, not system) will help somewhat when reading sources and writing to a drive, but it’s not as important as processor most of the time. Video editing apps need faster hard drives more than AE does.

That’s about it. Fast processors, more RAM, hard drive.
Nobody fine-tunes a box for AE any further than that, as far as I know.

[Jonathan Miller]

Obviously, the faster a computer, the faster the preview and render. If you’re using 3D layers DOF and lights and casting shadows, you can speed the build of your comp by using the draft 3d mode to get everything in place and moving correctly and then turn it off to tweak the final look.

Probably the most overlooked way to help with long render times is to give your client realistic estimates of how long it will take to actually do the work. For instance, if a project will take you one week, then tell your client it will take 10 days or 2 weeks. Then, if you finish in one week, deliver it “early” and be their hero.

Good luck!

Jon
TreeLine Productions
Fort Collins, CO USA

Currently producing these popular podcasts:

[Rhett Robinson]

“No card can speed up rendering”

I’m not sure that I understand this… I use a fairly recent ATI card, and although it’s already on my fastest machine, it still seem to speed up rendering, especially if I use the openGL capabilities for 3D stuff. Am I missing something? Admittedly, I sometimes have not been happy with the openGL results, and re-rendered the project, but it seems to dramatically speed up previews as well as rendering. It’s on the Adobe approved list of cards, but I didn’t have to pay a fortune, about 200 bucks since I got it on sale.

[Rai Pandudita]

thank you. so graphic card doesn’t really affect AE’s rendering process then? what processor do you recommend? AMD or Intel? and what type?

[Rai Pandudita]

Probably the most overlooked way to help with long render times is to give your client realistic estimates of how long it will take to actually do the work.

that is exactly my problem, early this may i took a small budget project with a big audience that has to be done by June 10th, that is less than a month, I calculated everything will be done in 3 weeks, and the rest is for rendering. usually it took me less than one day to render a 5-10 minutes project. but now i’m experimenting with animation using illustrator image and photoshop layers in AE, and even in a quarter quality it’s still very heavy to ram preview, so I can’t see clearly if the animation is just as i wanted or not, then i tried rendering and it took 21 hours to render a 20 second project. time is ticking out and I still don’t know what to do.

[Steve Roberts]

Just in case we’re not on the same page, in the context of AE, “rendering” means “rendering to disk”, not “rendering to screen”. That’s called “previewing” in the AE context. If you knew that, then my apologies. 🙂

Now, I’ll be the first to admit I’m semi-clueless regarding using OpenGL to render to disk, since I haven’t tested it and I’m reluctant to spend the time to test it, since most of my renders require features and effects that OpenGL doesn’t render.

So you’re using OpenGL to render to disk? How do you find it?