Motion vs After Effects – Render shoot-out shock result

[Stephen Smith]

Wow, that link had to much to read 🙂 What card or cards was Oliver Peters using in his test?

Stephen Smith – Follow me on Behance

Utah Video Productions

Check out my Motion Training DVD

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[Simon Ubsdell]

ATI 5870

BTW I copied his test and got the same results

That’s 40 x slower – not a typo!

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

Here’s Oliver’s post in full:

I had a chance to run a test. I took 6 ProResLT 1080p/23.98 clips and put them on a :10 timeline. Clips were scaled to 25%, spread around the screen in an irregular pattern and rotated on the Z axis. I applied a native (not third party) filter to each clip. These included glow, bulge distortion, gaussian blur, sepia, posterization and bad TV. I did a test this way and also with the whole group rotated in XYZ as a flat plane. I did this on the Group in Motion and using a null layer in AE.

I saw the same things you saw in terms of scrubbing through the timeline. Motion was more or less real-time. It got a bit choppier with the XYZ rotation. Interestingly, Motion would get choppier when the playback looped back to the start of the sequence and then played a second or third time. I rendered out to ProRes with and without the rotation of the whole, but that did not affect render times.

Plain vanilla renders. No lighting, motion blur or reflection effects. Render results were about :10 for Motion and 6 min. for After Effects.

Looks like I be working harder at liking Motion 😉

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Stephen Smith]

Here is the problem with his test. It is an Apples to Orange test due to the card. ATI 5870 is optimized for Motion.

That card is not optimized for After Effects. Here is the list: https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/policy-pricing/system-requirements-effects.html

I used both After Effects and Motion. And the card makes a big difference. After Effects was slow for me when I did most of my work in Motion. After FCPX I switch to a Premiere and AE workflow. A matter of fact, Premiere’s real time playback was sluggish at best. When I switched over to a NVIDIA Quadro 4000 card I saw dramatic improvement in playback in AE and Premiere. Now when I jump back into Motion for a legacy project to make changes I can tell that it is sluggish. Some crazy big projects won’t even render and I have to take it into a different edit bay that has a card Motion likes.

It is not about the program but what the artist can do with the program.

Stephen Smith – Follow me on Behance

Utah Video Productions

Check out my Motion Training DVD

Check out my Vimeo page

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Stephen Smith] “It is not about the program but what the artist can do with the program.”

Quite so 😉

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com