Is this as good as it gets?

[Kevin Camp]

to see if that’s as good as it gets on your system, open the task manager (or similar) and check the cpu levels to see if they are near max levels while rendering.

if they are, then yes, that’s as good as it gets… if not then you should be able to get better performance out of ae.

but check the cpu activity with your current lettings and get back to us.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Jonny Webb]

nothing open except AE CS6
(all possible windows background services stopped, but i also tried with defaults)

import 4min clip of DV Type 1
make a comp from selection (checked settings, all good)

apply warp stablilizer, default settings…

waiting 17 mins. Task Mgr CPU = 25% (+/- 3%). Memory = 2.6GB (out of 12GB). Individual graphs of cpus are all very low – only the first seems to jump to 40% now and then…

AE Settings: yes to Multiple Frames Simultaneously
Installed cores = 4, Ram/bg=1GB, Actual CPUs used=3

Likewise – i’ve added the finished comp to RenderQueue, chosen Best Settings and Lossless, and clicked Render…

Estimated Time: 3Hrs
CPUs: (all 4 jumped to 100% for a couple of secs) now settled down to 70% (memoory 6GB)

So is this really is as good as it gets – or does your machine touch 100% for rendering?

[Kevin Camp]

sorry johnny, i missed that you were using warp stabilizer…

i don’t have cs6, so i can’t confirm this of your version, but warp stabilizer in previous versions did not take advantage of ae’s ‘render multiple frames simultaneously’ feature. it is launched in the background as a separate process.

so that may be as good as it gets for warp stabilizer… you might try disabling the rmfs option and giving ae about 60% of your ram to see what varying that ram allocation does. obviously you won’t see all the cores getting used, but perhaps you can eek out a bit better performance for warp stabilizer.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Nevin Styre]

If your system has a mercury playback supported CUDA card you might be better off applying the warp stabilizer in Premiere Pro CS6, as now with CS6 Premiere can accelerate the warp stabilizer with CUDA while in After Effects it can only use the CPU.

[Jonny Webb]

I actually forgot PP now does WStab – and that was why i installed it in the first place. Typical late night working eh?

So i gave it a go, and noticed that it does behave rather differently.
The Analysing is slightly slower, 19mins not 16mins (could be other influences there)

But after Stabilization, nothing seems to work correctly. The default settings, as far as i can tell the same as in AE, results in most of the picture being sliced off leaving a very-letterbox look.
My other favorite, Synth-Edges, doesnt appear to work at all, the corners & edges have black bits (AE managed to fill them in!)

And annoyingly no progress bar to say PP is even trying to do anything front or background. (and my cpu usage implies nothing is actually going on). So i dont think this filter actually works in PP.

I’m going to try again later with a small clip to see if PP can match AE.
Thanks for the help.

++ As we’re all here, i guess we’re not all there ++

[Jonny Webb]

UPDATE: i had to leave my comp for an hour. And when i returned nothing has changed. So PP definately doesnt do anything ‘in the background’. At lease regarding Warp Stab.
And it still does do SynthEdges like AE’s version.
And my comps memory useage is 8Gb compared to AEs 6-7GB.

Hum! Not impressed. I dont think i’ll be buying any upgrades soon.

[Jonny Webb]

And Finally…

I’ve come to the conclusion that useing Warp Stabilizer in PP is not worth the effort. It definately does not work as well as in AE.

As for speed etc, i’ve been reading alot and it seems the bottleneck is the graphics card. Warp, and a few other effects, are heavily dependent on CUDA. So the more CUDAs on the graphics card, the faster the effects are processed.
Apparently there is a limit – a few hundred CUDAs is all that AE can utilise, but thats in the price range of thousands.

I think its time for a better graphics card.

(hope this helps others)

++ As we’re all here, i guess we’re not all there ++