Expectations for AE and the New Mac Pro

[Erik Lindahl]

One thing to keep in mind is that RAM-previews only use one instance of AE as of CC. This is due to, I think, the multi-instances buggy nature and quite slow initiaiation. Hence in a worst-case scenario you’re using maybe 10th of your machine. When doing renders it might be worth testing other setups for multi-rendering. 4-8 instances might be more efficient than say 12.

That said, single thread performance should be way better than the 2008 Xeons. I’ve noticed on our 2008 MacPro some things can “kill” the GUI-experience of AE. This tends to be certain filters and especially multiple instances of them. Color Finess is one of them I beilive. Other things can kill GUI-performance also. Perhaps semi complex 3D comps is one of them? This is due to an aintient architecture in AE where i believe the GUI-redraw thread is shared with the scene / comp redraw. This of course can cause a very nasty user experience (something Adobe REALLY should fix).

Never the less you should do some head to head tests perhaps. I can’t imagine anything being slower on the new MacPro aside from RayTracing IF your old machine had a nVidia card. You should also experiment with what might be the cause of slow-downs. I’ve in the past noticed some filters do it, forcing me to deactivate them until final renders. The sad part is that the renders don’t take crazy long, it’s just the filters kill the GUI-experience.

[Walter Soyka]

I think your multiprocessing settings are too aggressive. You can experiment a bit, but my general suggestion is leave a quarter of available RAM to other apps, and half of available CPUs on hyperthreaded systems. For you, that’d be 16 GB to other apps and 12 cores to other processes.

More from Adobe here:
https://forums.adobe.com/message/2475693

This may speed up your renders a little bit, but it will not have much effect on interactions, as Erik noted.

It is possible to use MP for RAM previews, though this is not the default. If you have it enabled, starting the RAM preview will take a while before any progress can be amde as all the background instances of the renderer must start up and load the project, media, and caches.

The Ae team is currently taking a good, hard look at performance:
https://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2014/01/happy-new-year-and-a-question.html

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

[Scott Reus]

Thanks for your reply, Erik. I had AMD cards on the last one, too, so I’ve never used ray-tracing. I’ve double and triple-checked, though, just to see if that’s what was causing it. Of course, that would be too easy. I’ll do some tests and see what happens.

It’s hard to believe a machine this robust can’t crunch through the GUI more efficiently. Or that AE is really that bad. That combined with the long RAM previews and my experience is almost identical to that of my 2008 MP… except I have a lot more desk space.

Does anybody else out there with a new Mac Pro have some AE experiences they can share? Specifically with the GUI, RAM previews or rendering? Rock solid? Fast? Slow? I’m not sure if I should reinstall everything or just lower my expectations back down to where they were in 2008…

Thanks, -s

[Scott Reus]

Thanks Walter, I will definitely take your advice on that. The link about optimum memory settings was great, better than what I found on my own. I really hope they do address speed in 2014.

[Walter Soyka] “It is possible to use MP for RAM previews, though this is not the default. If you have it enabled, starting the RAM preview will take a while before any progress can be amde as all the background instances of the renderer must start up and load the project, media, and caches.”

Where do I change this in the preferences? It sounds like one of my issues…

Cheers, -s

[Walter Soyka]

[Scott Reus] “Where do I change this in the preferences? It sounds like one of my issues…”

Preferences > Memory & Multiprocessing…

In the “After Effects Multiprocessing” section, there are two checkboxes. “Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously” enables multiprocessing. “Only for Render Queue, not for RAM Preview” when checked disables MP for RAM preview. When unchecked, MP applies for both the render queue and RAM preview.

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

[Scott Reus]

Right, gotcha. Yes, Multiple-Frames checked, Only for Render Queue not checked.

I just tried to RAM Preview 5 seconds of the comp. There are maybe 20 active layers in those 5 seconds, half of them control layers, the rest 3d text with a camera. No lights. No motion blur. It took 10 seconds to begin the RAM Preview. Once it started it was quick. With motion blur turned on, though, the RAM Preview didn’t start 40+ seconds, and once it did, it was not quick.

This is not normal, right? Shouldn’t I expect speed with this set up?

I used to work with a lady that could break computers just by being near them. I think I may have caught what she had. -s

[Walter Soyka]

[Scott Reus] “Right, gotcha. Yes, Multiple-Frames checked, Only for Render Queue not checked. I just tried to RAM Preview 5 seconds of the comp. There are maybe 20 active layers in those 5 seconds, half of them control layers, the rest 3d text with a camera. No lights. No motion blur. It took 10 seconds to begin the RAM Preview. Once it started it was quick. With motion blur turned on, though, the RAM Preview didn’t start 40+ seconds, and once it did, it was not quick.”

Look at the Info panel. It probably says “Initializing Background Processes. This may take some time.”

If you uncheck “Only for Render Queue” in preferences, your RAM previews will start processing almost immediately, but Ae will not use multiprocessing to accelerate them once they begin. It is a tradeoff.

Motion blur is a render hog.

Although your nMP is significantly faster than your 2008 MP, Ae is still not a real-time application. Even on brand-new and very powerful machines, the Improve performance page [link] is still relevant.

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

[Ericbowen]

Move the comp to your OS drive and check the ram Preview again just as a test to see how long the indexing takes. Input commands like interface options and keyframes are single threaded only. Those according to Adobe cannot be predicted well enough to program for efficient threading. That means you can quickly queue out the CPU interrupts on 1 core with those. I suspect that is what your scripts are doing if you have allot going at once. Also I normally don’t leave any CPU’s left for background processing with other applications and don’t see that behavior. However Windows gives you the ability to give background processes priority as a global setting which probably alleviates that. Unfortunately the nMpro’s are not ideal for AE because those 2 GPU modules don’t help at all. Really a PC is better for AE at this point since you can get 2 CPU’s instead. Your render times are not really that bad for AE with that many layers.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager
support@adkvideoediting.com

[Erik Lindahl]

The issue with AE is a lot of stuff scales poorly or misbehaves with multi-instance rending. I’m not sure a massive 24 core machine is the solution in AE’s current state.

Where Adobe to magically solve this I’d agree. But currently… Not so sure. Some projects scale perfectly, others not very well at all. And this wouldn’t solve AE’s sometimes horrible GUI-performance.

AMD vs nVidia cards is more a non-issue unless you’re talking raytracing but that’s a very small part of most AE users usage I’d imagine and won’t fix anything for the OP sadly.

With this said I can say AE CC 12.2 feels a lot more “rapid” on a fairly maxed out 2012 iMac vs a 2008 MacPro probably due to much faster single-thread performance. I’d imagine a 2013 MacPro feels roughly like this iMac (perhaps the 12-core doesn’t as it’s got a somewhat lower speed, the others should scale quite well in single-thread).

[Todd Kopriva]

See my response to your related questions here:
https://forums.adobe.com/message/6133701#6133701

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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