highly saturated render – what is happening

[Hope Holmesby]

Dave…thanks

that was very informative…whether the effect is on or off, still renders….wow

very humorous remark at end…made me laugh…..

thanks again…iowa humor?

i lived in Fairfield, not too far from cedar rapids for some years….loved iowa.

__________________________________________________

Life is here to enjoy.

iMac 3.5 GHz Intel Core i7, 2TB;
Mac OS 10.9,
16 GB RAM;
2 La Cie external HDs 1 TB each;
After Effects CS5.5;
Sound Track Pro 3.0.1;
Final Cut Pro 7.0.3;
Compressor 3.5.3

[Walter Soyka]

[Dave LaRonde] “AE defaults to rendering EVERY effect, no matter if they’re on or off: if they’re in the comp, AE will render them.”

That is not the default behavior (unless you have modified your default render settings).

How effects are rendered is governed by the “Effects” control in Render Settings. The default for “Best Settings” effects rendering is “Current Settings” which means effects that are on will render and effects that are off will not.

This can be overridden in render settings to “All On” or “All Off,” irrespective of the layer’s own settings, but Hope’s screenshot shows this is correctly set to “Current Settings.”

Hope, are you using color management in Ae? How are you viewing the render to compare?

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

[Dave LaRonde] “Okay, Walter, I’ve been assiduously deleteting unwanted effects since version 4. When did THAT rendering behavior change?”

I’m not sure. I think I started with 4.1, and this has been the default behavior for as long as I am aware.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Hope Holmesby]

ok, you two are both very funny….getting a chuckle here….

Ok, thanks for asking, Walter, not using any color management

BUT…since u asked that, i realized when looking at the effects on that comp (layer) that the pipeline maybe messing it up…and sure enuf, I had

Trapcode glow
‘levels’
‘HueSaturation’

when i moved the ‘glow’ to the bottom, upon rendering it didnt do that….
hurray…

however, i feel tricked, that AE didnt reveal that in the timeline preview.
doesnt the preview usualy tip you off in these things?

do you think it is because I am running ad cs5.5 in mavericks?

thanks again…warmly,
Hope

PS….i dont ever use my 16GB of ram to process anything in AE…it only uses about 6GN at the most…

I feel something must be wrton?

__________________________________________________

Life is here to enjoy.

iMac 3.5 GHz Intel Core i7, 2TB;
Mac OS 10.9,
16 GB RAM;
2 La Cie external HDs 1 TB each;
After Effects CS5.5;
Sound Track Pro 3.0.1;
Final Cut Pro 7.0.3;
Compressor 3.5.3

[Walter Soyka]

[Hope Holmesby] “when i moved the ‘glow’ to the bottom, upon rendering it didnt do that…. hurray… however, i feel tricked, that AE didnt reveal that in the timeline preview. doesnt the preview usualy tip you off in these things?”

I see from your screenshots that you’ve set the render settings to 32 bits per channel. Because 32bpc allows values brighter than white and darker than black, many effects and blend modes can look very different.

The best place to set your project to 32bpc is not in the render settings, but rather in the project settings (Cmd+Shift+Opt+K) or by alt-clicking on the depth indicator on the bottom of the project panel. By changing the depth in the render settings off of “Current Settings” you were telling Ae to preview at one depth and render at another, with critically different rules for how math works.

If you do change the depth in project settings, there is no need to change the default render settings away from “Current Settings.”

I suspect it worked when you rearranged the effects because one of your effects is not 32bpc or perhaps internally clamps values.

[Hope Holmesby] “PS….i dont ever use my 16GB of ram to process anything in AE…it only uses about 6GN at the most… I feel something must be wrton?”

You might enable multiprocessing. 16 GB isn’t a lot of RAM for Ae, but it’s enough that you could run a couple of background processes to help speed up your renders. In your Memory & Multiprocessing settings, leave at least 4-6 GB free for other applications, and use a minimum of 2 GB for each background renderer.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Hope Holmesby]

Hi Walter,

Thanks so much…
So appreciate.

Ok, realized i should not have been rendering at 32 bits. It should have read ‘current settings’. Plus 8bit is fine for our broadcasting I’ve just been informed, so that is easy.

Walter: “The best place to set your project to 32bpc is not in the render settings, but rather in the project settings (Cmd+Shift+Opt+K) or by alt-clicking on the depth indicator on the bottom of the project panel. By changing the depth in the render settings off of “Current Settings” you were telling Ae to preview at one depth and render at another, with critically different rules for how math works.”‘>

Oh boy…I can see that now…fixed that. Thanks for all these great points.

Walter: “You might enable multiprocessing. 16 GB isn’t a lot of RAM for Ae, but it’s enough that you could run a couple of background processes to help speed up your renders. In your Memory & Multiprocessing settings, leave at least 4-6 GB free for other applications, and use a minimum of 2 GB for each background renderer.”

OK, set it from 0 to 6GB free for other applications
and it is already set to 3 GB for each background renderer (I have 8 cpu’s – 8 core)

What do you think? Or maybe I have this all wrong…?

Or better like this?

What do you think?
I so appreciate.

For Previews I have this, what do you think?

Thanks again so much for all your time…really is so helpful. What good fellows you all are to help us.
Warmly,
Hope

__________________________________________________

Life is here to enjoy.

iMac 3.5 GHz Intel Core i7, 2TB;
Mac OS 10.9,
16 GB RAM;
2 La Cie external HDs 1 TB each;
After Effects CS5.5;
Sound Track Pro 3.0.1;
Final Cut Pro 7.0.3;
Compressor 3.5.3

[Walter Soyka]

As you note, Ae will show you how many CPUs it will use for rendering with your current multiprocessing settings. 0 would be bad, so tweaking as you did is good.

Just a couple notes: closing other applications and even sometimes rebooting can free up additional RAM for Ae.

Not every comp has the same rendering requirements, so there are no perfect universal multiprocessing settings. On a system with 16 GB of RAM, you must balance RAM usage against CPU usage. Pushing one too high may mean sacrificing speed.

I’d leave that OpenGL preview renderer off. It lies: that is, it doesn’t match the final renderer. The OpenGL renderer was actually even removed from Ae CS6.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Hope Holmesby]

Hi Walter…

I so appreciate you taking the time to listen and answer these things.

Have been wondering about these things for such a long time.

How can one really know what settings to use, then, for memory and process?

The kind of motion graphics I am doing at the moment are pretty simple. Only using AE effects except some Trapecode Glow, Shine, Particular, no 3d objects…just pretty much simple things. As a sample, here is a highly compressed version on the latest video.

Would you be able to tell from this? This sample would just be to show and get approvals, then once approved, we send to the video department an mpg2 which is 720 wide, which is broadcast on the web: (Preview version: https://honey.globalgoodnews.com/test_movies/deepavali.mov )

Which one of the below settings do you think would be best option…or some other option you would suggest:

What do you think?

Thanks again so much.

Sending so much thanks to you, Walter,
Warmly,
Hope

Note: I have noticed since installing mavericks that cs5.5 AE is giving me the beachball, which it never did before. Never did that with Snow Leopard.
I think, if I keep on with this cs5.5 that I have to go back to Snow Leopard. I read some where that CS5.5 is optimized for Snow Leopard and CS6 for Lion and Mt. Lion, and CC on, for Mavericks.

__________________________________________________

Life is here to enjoy.

iMac 3.5 GHz Intel Core i7, 2TB;
Mac OS 10.9,
16 GB RAM;
2 La Cie external HDs 1 TB each;
After Effects CS5.5;
Sound Track Pro 3.0.1;
Final Cut Pro 7.0.3;
Compressor 3.5.3

[Walter Soyka]

[Hope Holmesby] “How can one really know what settings to use, then, for memory and process?”

A bit of trial and error. Generally speaking, if you have pushed your CPU utilization up nearly as high as it can go without absolutely pegging RAM or disk use, you’re getting the fastest renders you can on your hardware. Take a look at Activity Monitor while you render for an idea of how your system resources are being used.

Quick intro to multiprocessing:

Ae launches multiple copies of the renderer, each responsible for one frame at a time, and each requiring its own area of memory. Because of this requirement, on a system like yours with only 16 GB of memory, RAM becomes the limiting factor on performance.

You need to set aside enough RAM for other applications to allow your system’s background processes to continue running smoothly. This reduces the total amount of RAM available to Ae, but if you are too aggressive and tell Ae to leave too little RAM for other processes, your OS will run out of RAM and will start swapping memory in and out to the hard disk, grinding your computer’s performance way down. If your system becomes slow to respond and everything you try to do is accompanied by hard disk access and a slight delay, your system is starved of RAM and is swapping.

Quitting other unnecessary applications can free up RAM. (You might be surprised how much RAM even your web browser can soak up.)

Assuming you have enough RAM for other processes to run smoothly, Ae can have whatever is left. It will divide this RAM among all background processes, then use the “CPUs reserved for other apps” and “RAM allocations per background CPU” to control how many processes are launched and what of the remaining system resources are allocated to each.

Of the two you listed, the first option is probably better. Note that the first option says that 2 CPUs will be used and the second option says that 0 will be used.

However, note that if a render process has access to too little RAM, it may fail — so using lots of CPUs with only a little bit of RAM may be false economy!

Really, if you want to exploit multiprocessing to the fullest, you would benefit from more RAM in your computer.

[Hope Holmesby] “I read some where that CS5.5 is optimized for Snow Leopard and CS6 for Lion and Mt. Lion, and CC on, for Mavericks.”

I wouldn’t say “optimized” — that implies that the application has been tuned for a specific version of the operating system. Rather, I’d say “supported” meaning that the application has been tested on a specific version of the operating system.

Sorry, but I have no experience with CS5.5 on Mavericks. You might want to start another thread about that to try to get someone else’s attention who’d be able to help better.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Hope Holmesby]

Hi Walter,
This is amazing you know all this. I will study this and see what I can do.
I will get back to you .

You are a saint and a scholar.

Apprciate so much dear Walter,
Warmly,
Hope

__________________________________________________

Life is here to enjoy.

iMac 3.5 GHz Intel Core i7, 2TB;
Mac OS 10.9,
16 GB RAM;
2 La Cie external HDs 1 TB each;
After Effects CS5.5;
Sound Track Pro 3.0.1;
Final Cut Pro 7.0.3;
Compressor 3.5.3