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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects Hardware Acceleration

  • Steve Roberts

    April 7, 2005 at 6:29 pm

    That’s about it. Fancy graphics cards don’t help, since AE’s OpenGL implementation isn’t very good right now. Many users switch it off.

    There are no AE hardware accelerators out there. The Blue ICE cards used to serve that purpose, but they’re obsolete and have long since been abandoned.

    However, if you want to speed up your renders considerably, set up a multi-instance render. Use the “multi-machine” preset, then save that project. Next, from the command line, launch a new instance of AE thusly:

    “C:…Program Files…Adobe…After Effects 6.5…Support Files…AfterFX.exe” -m

    (dots substitute for slashes here – COW don’ like no slashes)(keep the quotes and the space-dash-m)

    Open the project in the new instance and hit render. Remember, this only works when rendering image sequences. When done, do a quick render of the sequence into a movie if you like.

    Hope that helps,
    Steve

  • Paul Carlin

    April 7, 2005 at 11:33 pm

    Yes, if you are using a dual processing PC (not Mac) then you can take advantage of the -m switch. You also need the MP plug-in which gets installed when you install the Application. Read the AE help page titled, “Running After Effects on multiprocessor systems”

    I find this useful for sequences as mentioned above, but I also enjoy the fact that I can be rendering something in the background (even QTs and AVIs) and still work on another project in the foreground. On big jobs this helps a lot.

    Be aware that if you have two instances of AE rendring something very intense, you may have a hard time regaining control of the system due to the processor time being used up by AE.

  • Steve Roberts

    April 8, 2005 at 12:29 am

    [Paul Carlin] “Be aware that if you have two instances of AE rendring something very intense, you may have a hard time regaining control of the system due to the processor time being used up by AE.”

    This is true. Both processors will pin at 100% (good) but the computer is basically useless for other tasks until the render’s done. (bad)
    Of course, you can always pause the render to do what you need, then resume. Or pause one render, and let the other one take it for a while as you do something else.

    Steve

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