Expectations for AE and the New Mac Pro

[Gates Bradley]

Also, you said that you have 116 pre-comps? That is your issue, right there, I suspect.

It’s not apples to apples, but I recently worked on a 4K AE project using a completely tricked out PC made by AMD themselves (it was a commercial for their products). 3 GPUs crossfired, their beefiest processors, and 24 GB of RAM, with everything firing on SSDs. I had about 96 layers, I think, in my timeline, and I was getting massively slow RAM previews, whereas my colleague was working on the same project (albeit with a different AE project file) with a 2012 MBP and was having much better results than I.

It seems AE really doesn’t like you to go over a certain amount of layers. Not sure why, exactly, and I’m not sure where the cutoff is, but once I pre-rendered a handful of layers my results improved dramatically.

I know this isn’t a total fix for you, but hopefully it sheds some light on the situation.

[Erik Lindahl]

One major problem is AE. As I understand it the entire app runs in basically one thread, so a complex multi-layer, multi-comp project will at some point overwhelm the computer. I’ve seen this far to many times lately. Actually rendering out will be vasty faster than ram-previewing – I think – due to the app doesn’t have to concider GUI-redraws and user interaction calls to the same degree.

Not a fix but an explanation. I do hear Adobe is focusing a lot of performance right now. Maybe NAB will bring something?

[Scott Reus]

It was definitely the amount of pre-comps that was killing it. I just went back and checked, and there were over 300 layers. I always thought that only the layers being displayed demanded the horsepower- and so the amount of other layers wouldn’t matter- but that’s apparently not the case. I’ve completed several other smaller jobs and they were all pretty zippy, and definitely faster than my 2008 MacPro. 🙂

Pre-rendering definitely helps. And the multiprocessing settings that Walter recommend made a big difference, too.

I actually received an email directly from an Adobe rep after my similar post on the We Want A New Mac Pro FB page. Lou Borella, the site’s owner, was able to hook that up for me. He mentioned as well that they will be focussing on performance in the upcoming year, and said, specifically, they were looking to separate the render thread from the UI thread, which is great. I look forward to that update alone.

Thanks again, everyone, for your responses.

[Mark Linthicum]

AE is very inefficient! A clunky piece of crap you might say.

try cloning a clip in the same location for 12 frames using -1 frame for the source, you will see how pathetic it is. Adobe has been focused on features for the last few years, ignoring performance! Very frustrating especially on the MAC. Lets hope the New Mac Pro changes this, primer seems to be making headway, now how about AE Adobe?

Thanks, Mark