Light Wrap is soooo slow…

[Tim Kolb]

Hi John,

Well…Light wrapping isn’t a simple effect to calculate certainly…but how do you determine it’s only working on one core?

When I put it on a clip and render a preview, I seem to use all the cores…so I have no idea if other functions are triggering those other cores, but in this case, lightwrap was the only thing active at all as I tried to isolate it.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[John Rowe]

Hi Tim,

Just pop up the Windows Task Manager and you’ll see it’s using only one CPU.

It’s fine in After Effects because AE deals with multithreading by running multiple instances of itself with each one rendering a single frame. So non-multithreaded effects still use all the CPU power in the machine.

Premiere however doesn’t do that. In Premiere it seems to be up to the individual effect to be multithreaded or not.

I’ve just tried the BCC Light Wrap effect. It seems to be faster but still doesn’t seem to use multiple cores.

Can anyone suggest another Light Wrap effect that’s faster or uses multiple CPUs in Premiere?

Thanks,
John

[Tim Kolb]

Hmmm…

Even on a four-core machine I had a chance to quickly test, both BCC Light Wrap and Digieffects Lightwrap from Delerium2 seem to render pretty quickly…in fact I would have to say that this would be the first time I’ve ever checked them and I was a little surprised at how fast they were…and they seemed to light up all four cores for the 2 seconds they took to render an 8 second segment…again on a dual-dual core system.

I have a CPU gauge on the desktop and the task manager performance tab all seem to indicate the same thing…all four cores seem to spike.

…and of course I’m not using anything but that effect in an attempt to isolate it.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[John Rowe]

Wow! That’s really surprising! That’s just not the performance I’m seeing at all.

What res was the footage you tried it on? I’m using HD 1920×1280 25FPS footage that I’m keying using UltraKey. So I have both the UltraKey Effect and the DE Light Wrap Effect applied one after the other on the footage layer.

Are you using a similar setup?

Thanks for going to all this trouble,
John

[John Rowe]

I just tried running DE LightWrap on a simple circle generated using the Circle Effect in a HD 1920×1080 25 FPS sequence.

Rendering an 8 sec long sequence took 8 mins!!! and only 9% of the CPU was being used. 😛

[Tim Kolb]

Wow…that’s pretty strange.

I had an alpha channel photoshop doc on top of a layer of black…placed both Light Wrap effects…and then hit the ‘enter’ key to render work area effects.

Footage was 1920×1080 23.976 fps.

The 4 processor cores all went to about 60%…but it was so quick that they didn’t get to top out. The chart in the performance tab confirmed that all processor cores came up…

I have 2 sockets, each with two physical cores (AMD 2220s) on the particular machine I was testing it on…are you referring to an i7 970 with 6 physical cores and 12 on hyperthreading?

I can try to use Ultra and the lightwrap effects together and see what happens… Keeping in mind of course that a CUDA GPU card will have to do some switching between the CUDA pipeline (for Ultra) and the more traditional GPU duties that Boris and Digieffects ask for…no third party effects use the CUDA pipeline.

But that doesn’t explain an 8 minute render on an 8 second light wrap effect alone.

What kind of source material is it?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

What are your sequence settings? Are you working on a sequence in 32 bit float?

What is the source material?

There HAS to be a catch here somewhere…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[John Rowe]

Ok, I did some tests:
Sequence: AVCHD 1080p25 with
1 layer of 1280/1080 Video “Talking Head” keyed with UltraKey,
1 CG background layer loop rendered as mp4 from After Effects at 720×576 and scaled up to fill frame and Nested to keep BCC Light Wrap happy.

Sequence->Render Effects in Work Area (252 frames) with Max Render Quality On/Off
BCC Light Wrap (MP On) 54/27 secs
BCC Light Wrap (MP Off) 108/55 secs

DE LightWrap 6 mins/ 6 mins

(MP stands for Multithreaded Processing Option in BCC Light Wrap Setup)

Preferences->Memory->Optimize Rendering for Memory or Performance doesn’t affect time.
Sequence Settings->Max Bit Depth doesn’t affect time.

Wow! That’s quite a difference!
I guess I’m using BCC Light Wrap from here on out!
Message to DE LightWrap: You’d better lift your game guys!!! BCC Light Wrap renders up to 12 times faster!!!

[Tim Kolb]

GPU acceleration can make quite a difference…

While I haven’t been able to follow up with more testing (I find it strange that I get better performance than you do…), I would say that these plugs all have a place. Speed is always a factor.

However, the Digieffects Lightwrap plug still accomplishes the task at a high quality level for a 49.00 USD effect (you can buy it ‘a la carte’).

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,