New Desktop For After Effects

[Andrew Somers]

You can multi-thread with “RenderGarden” and it’s cheap!

AE used to multithread, it went away only because they are changing the render system and are “supposed” to be bringing multithreading back in a better way…….. but apparently not yet.

The AE Ray Tracer WILL take advantage of your CUDA cores, but the ray tracer is of limited use.

Nevertheless, your CUDA cores will go great with OCTANE or REDSHIFT which are physical raytracers that work with C4D, and run amazing on CUDA.

All that said — is this for hobby use? Then your build is fine. But if you are going to be doing actual production wok with deadlines to meet, your rig is about half the power/capabilities you need.

IMO get a dual CPU Xeon system, with 6 or 8 physical cores per CPU. With 8 each that will giver you 32 threads. Here’s the thing, you could get a new but older gen XEON setup for about the same money or less than a new i7 rig, and the Xeon rig will outperform the consumer grade i7.

48GB RAM is a minimum, but 64 total is more ideal especially if you get the full 32 thread version. You need the RAM so you can render in the BG with RenderGarden.

You’ll want a graphics card with more CUDA cores (for using a real physical raytracer), and more RAM on that card, so the 1080ti is a better choice – 11GB RAM and over 3500 cores (more than twice the 1060 – you WILL notice the difference).

And something you didn’t list – you want a RAID. Even if it’s just two or three drives striped as Raid 0, the speed difference is very noticeable both in terms of working and in terms of render time.

SO IMO, go Workstation:

1) Dual XEONs with 6 or 8 physical cores each.
2) 48 to 64 GB RAM.
3) nVidea 1080ti with 11GB RAM (getting two would be *ideal* if you’re going to do a lot of ray tracing).
4) PCI mounted SSD controller & SSD drive (better speed than SATA).
5) two or three drives striped as Raid 0 — (note than when you are striping as Raid 0 you pretty much *have* to run continuous auto backups like TimeMachine on OS X).
6) A dual Xeon motherboard with at least two 16x PCIe slots (one for the SSD, one for the 1080ti), slots for at least 48GB RAM, 3 or more SATA ports for striping drives together, etc.

And you could build this yourself too.

Edit to add this article from https://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/

Good luck

Andrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com

[Omar Wanis]

Wow that was a detailed answer, thank you!
A couple of things though:

1- Forgot to mention that my budget is around 2000 $, so i’d have to cut down on some specs, i think starting with the GPU since it’s the least important part as far as i know (given i don’t do too much Ray-tracing).
2- I see that combining the 32 threads with Render Garden can be effective, but if i don’t get Render Garden, i won’t be using those threads, plus i have seen all builds recommend the i7-8700k, what do u think?
3- I’m getting this PC for studies and some freelancing because i have a daytime job and i use C4D only so few times, so 32 GB of RAM i think will get me through since RAM prices are sky rocketing.
4- Do i need M2 SSD? or i can go with the normal one?

[Andrew Somers]

Got it.

So, all of my machines (except laptops) are Dual Xeons loaded with RAM.

BUT ALSO, I *only* use versions of After Effects that ARE still multithreaded. And I absolutely will not upgrade until Adobe fixes this issue.

Your RAM requirements are directly tied to your number of cores and multi-threading requirements. So if you are going to stick with a consumer grade CPU like the i7, then 32 GB is fine.

However, the higher end graphics card isn’t that much more expensive considering it will boost the speed of a LOT of things in your working environment, not just raytracing. Having a really fast graphics card is important for display previews.

As for SSD, do not skimp.

I will only recommend that the SSD boot drive be in a 16x PCIe slot — PCIe not SATA — (And as I mentioned you need a motherboard with TWO 16x PCIe slots, one for the SSD and one for graphics.) The best configurations have multiple M2 SSDs in a RAID 0, and the speed is phenomenal.

Having the fastest SSD makes an enormous difference if you configure the System and After Effects correctly, meaning:

1) Make the SSD the SWAP drive for the OS.
2) Make the SSD the ADOBE CACHE drive (and set the cache big, like 50GB or more).
3) When you have unusually large files, like 20,000 x 20,000 image maps, store them on the SSD (and add that storage location to your files path for C4D or in AE keep the folder structure the same, and just relink one file and the rest will follow)).**
4) Either render TO or source FROM the SSD, so that you are not doing both read and writes from/to the spinning hard drive.

So then:

• An i7 Motherboard with two 16x PCIe slots.
• 32 GB Ram
• PCIe mounted SSD.
• Ideally a 1080ti, but a 1070ti with 8GB is okay. But forget the 1060, the 1070 has twice the cores but isn’t much more expensive.
• If you are doing anything “long” or at resolutions higher than HD, then you really need at least two hard drives in RAID 0, and am additional drive (USB 3 is okay) for continuous backup.

Edit to add:
** Footnote: While you’re probably going to keep most footage items on the Hard Drive Raid, it IS helpful to temporarily move the “really big” files you might have to deal with to the SSD. Using the search and replace path script can help facilitate this. Also, if your comp has several big files being comped together, you’ll definitely improve render time by moving those big files to the SSD and then rendering to the Harddrive Raid (if multi threaded such as with Render Garden — if not multi-threaded then read and write to the SSD is fastest as AE won’t be reading and writing at the same time. At least until they fix multithreading.)

Andrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com

[Omar Wanis]

Okay i got it, just a last couple of questions:

1- I need 2 M2 SSDs right? one for the OS, the other for the Disk Cache and maybe large files (I think 256 GB each is enough).
2- Do i need a swap drive? Aren’t those for helping the RAM when it’s out of memory?
3- About the Raid 0 backup thing, i need to continuously copy all my done work to the HDD so i empty more space for the SSDs for later projects, so i think that won’t be a problem right?
4- I’m always afraid of compatibility issues, even if i get a motherboard that would fit nice with all the chips i got, I always hear a MAC PC outperforms a Windows PC because of compatibility within its parts, alongside other stuff.
So aren’t there parts that would play nicer with other parts? Or that’s not the case?

Sorry if i lack some basic knowledge, I’m a beginner.
Thanks a lot!

[Andrew Somers]

Hey Omar, Here are some more answers. I understand this can seem complicated at first, but it will all make sense pretty soon.

Your boot drive as a PCIe card may support multiple SSDs, M2 is a form factor that fits well – Mine has two on the card, striped as Raid 0. SSDs are extremely orbust so it ‘s not “recarius” to use two SSDs in Raid 0. As a result they appear as one drive.

Your SWAP and CACHE will both be on the same boot drive as your system and applications.

No, SWAP is not just for when you’re low on memory — SWAP is integral to every modern operating system.

As for doing a Raid 0 with a couple regular hard drives — when I say continuous backups, I mean like Apple’s Time Machine, which does HOURLY back ups of only the files that have changed. If you are only using the Raid 0 hard drives for source footage, and you have that footage stored with the same file/folder structure elsewhere (as in on the delivery drive you received) then running time machine style backups isn’t needed — if you have a problem just re-load the media.

Myself, I have a Raid 0 with Time Machine, and I use it for more than media, so the consistent backup is a requirement. I do however keep the media files (that are available on other drives inside a subfoler at the root of ally my volumes, called /NOBACKUP

/NOBACKUP is excluded from Time Machine backups – but I’m not concerned as whenever is in the no backup folder is easily replaceable.

So to recap: You SSD(s) will all be joined as Raid 0 for performance, and will appear as a single volume, onto which you will install the OS, Apps, and set for Swap and Caches, and where appropriate source media.

If your SSD(s) aren’t big enough for holding your source media, you want that in hard drives striped for Raid 0.

If you strip physical hard drives to Raid 0, to protect against a high chance of a failure, you need to run frequent incremental backups, unless the media/files are easily replaced.

I hope that clears it up.

EDIT TO ADD: In an easier post I indicated needing a 16x PCIe slot for the SSD. That of course is only if you are getting a 16x SSD controller — in retrospect, for your application, even a 4 late PCIe controller should do well.

Andrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com

[Michael Szalapski]

[Andrew Somers] “AE used to multithread, it went away only because they are changing the render system and are “supposed” to be bringing multithreading back in a better way…….. but apparently not yet.”

I’d like to correct a bit of this.

AE did not “used to multithread”. It used to render multiple frames simultaneously which (while it may seem the same) is a totally different thing.

Rendering multiple frames simultaneously (RMFS) would use multiple cores on a machine – each rendering their own frame. This did make some scenes render faster, but it had a number of annoying bugs and “gotchas” that would often cause some fun forum threads. (You needed to seed the random number for wiggle expressions or it would be random between cores and Particular’s shading would flicker – for just a couple of examples.) Plus, some effects weren’t compatible with it at all and so – even if the effect was only used for a few frames, RMFS would be disabled and you’d be rendering on one core for the whole comp.

As opposed to that, as of CC 2015, After Effects is actually multithreaded in ways we could never have dreamed of in the past. The UI and renderer are now running on separate processing threads. This means that you can keep working in AE even while the comp window is trying to render an image. I’ve found this makes it much snappier to work with. Also, a number of effects in AE do render multithreaded. The latest update significantly improved the multithreading of the grain effects which are all much faster now (depending on your CPU, of course), the C4D renderer is fully multithreaded (for the 3d geometry it’s creating), and the Camera Shake Deblur effect is multithreaded – to name a few.

Does that make sense? AE’s building a new architecture that is genuinely multithreaded as opposed to the old hack that worked in a lot of situations, but was buggy.

[Andrew Somers] “The AE Ray Tracer WILL take advantage of your CUDA cores, but the ray tracer is of limited use.”

That’s true. AE’s ray-traced renderer is considered dead by the AE team and isn’t receiving any more development or support. (It doesn’t work with the latest NVIDIA cards, for example.)

HOWEVER, each version of AE adds more and more GPU-accelerated effects that will make use of CUDA. For example, Fractal Noise (an effect I use in virtually every project) is significantly faster even on my old GPUs in my home rig.

[Andrew Somers] “Nevertheless, your CUDA cores will go great with OCTANE or REDSHIFT which are physical raytracers that work with C4D, and run amazing on CUDA.”

Yes. Also in Cycles 4D! (My favorite because it works seamlessly with X-Particles, has the best node-editor of any third-party renderer, and can also render on the CPU [which means you can look-dev on your machine with GPUs and then send it to a render far to CPU render].)

Omar, if you plan to use a third-party GPU renderer with Cinema 4D, then I would not recommend dual Xeon processors at all. Get a single, high clock speed, processor and a really good GPU or two (or four…but not on your budget ???? ). A lot of stuff in C4D is also single-threaded, so if your renderer in C4D isn’t using the CPU, all those cores in a dual Xeon system won’t be doing you any good.

[Andrew Somers] “BUT ALSO, I *only* use versions of After Effects that ARE still multithreaded. And I absolutely will not upgrade until Adobe fixes this issue.”

I hope my post has helped clear some of this up for you, Andrew. The current versions of AE are significantly more multi-threaded compared to the old version you’re using. Yes, certain types of projects will render faster in the older version, but more and more of my projects render faster in the newest release with proper multithreading and GPU-accelerated effects. Plus, with the faster interactivity, I can work much faster in new versions of AE than the old ones too.

Also, some of the new features like Master Properties can save you literally DAYS of work (depending on the kind of work you do). Seriously, Master Properties is a huge game-changer. If you don’t see the advantage of it, I’m happy to go into lots of details about Master Properties. I love love love love love this feature.

Similarly, another game-changer is the ability of effects to reference the effects and masks of other layers without precomposing them. (For example, if you’re using Fractal Noise to drive a Displacement Map effect, you don’t have to precomp the layer with Fractal Noise anymore.) I’ve saved hours of time on some projects not having to dive in and out of precomps.

You can install the newest version of AE without removing your older version (just make sure when you click update that you twirl down the “advanced options” in the window that comes up and untick the “Remove older versions” option).
I’d highly recommend you try out some of the things I mentioned (Master Properties, GPU-accelerated effects, the ability for effects that reference other layers to get them post-masks and effects, the new Camera Shake Deblur effect, etc.) and maybe some of the other things I didn’t mention (the improved puppet tool, new expression error system, etc.) and see how you like them and think about how they could impact your work. It can’t hurt and it might really help you! ☺

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Andrew Somers]

I misspoke I suppose — by “multi-threaded” I meant “Multi Frame Render”, I was following along with the OP’s question instead of correcting semantics.

Just FYI: All versions of AE are “multi-threaded” since before CS3 (where multiframe render was introduced as a way to improve processor efficiency). CS3 thru CC14 are both multi-threaded and render multiple frames at the same time — I should have been more clear in that I meant multi-frame render, or at least a similar efficiency to CS6’s multi-frame render. My understanding is that some day in the future, the “new” multi-threading schema will either be “much more efficient” and/or “do multiple frames”. But it ain’t there yet.

The latest version I was playing with was 2017, and it was dog slow compared to CC14 or CS6 version with multi-frame render for rendering out long sequences of huge frames, which is what we mostly do.

The CS6 kind of multi-threading did in fact take advantage of multiple processors & multithreading even when set to render only one frame at a time, but unfortunately the efficiency and CPU utilization dropped rapidly as you added processors. With four or more processors the CPUs would never even get half way to max if rendering only a frame at a time. But If you look at processes, you’d see that each of the individual frames were spawning over a hundred threads.

But there were/are a lot of other bottlenecks on the processing of frames that limits CPU maximization.

Michael said …each version of AE adds more and more GPU-accelerated effects

Are those CUDA specific? Because I thought the trend was to go to Open CL, instead of being tied to nVidia.

As for “Master Properties”, it’s not that relevant to what we do, though interestingly we’ve been doing something similar in our workflow for years using scripts and expressions. (Our “template” project is over 20MB empty as it’s preset with all the input, output, test/alignment, and working comps needed).

But all of this is academic. I’m sure the newer versions have great features useful for some people. The upshot is that *at present* for what WE do, which involves rendering frames 4K and larger and straight-froward compositing and titles that don’t use a bunch of “effects”, anything after CC 14 isn’t a benefit, it’s a problem. We need to be able to render multiple-frames at-a-time during the day.

The ability of newer CC versions to “render in the BG” sounds neat, but I don’t like to render until I’m done with the comp, and if I want to render while I’m working on another comp, the first comp just gets sent to the farm. And when it comes to that I’d rather have one farm machine ending multiple frames and sucking 300 watts of power, than six machines each rendering one frame at a time sucking 1200-1800 or so watts of power total (based on real work wattage measurements back when I was trying to figure out how to lower the power bill).

Nevertheless, that feature is not unique to the more recent CCs, as there are plenty of ways to background render even on CS6 with a $35 script.

Andrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com

[Omar Wanis]

How’s AE multithreaded? Everywhere i see people talk on it being single threaded software. Is it multithreaded in one task like rendering or previewing? Or doing multiple tasks at the same time? And is it effective as multi-threading in 3D softwares like Houdini, or it has many limitations?

[Walter Soyka]

[Andrew Somers] “Michael said …each version of AE adds more and more GPU-accelerated effects
Are those CUDA specific? Because I thought the trend was to go to Open CL, instead of being tied to nVidia.”

Ae allows you to choose Metal, OpenCL or software-only (CPU) on Mac, or CUDA, OpenCL or software-only (CPU) on PC.

This is a project-level setting.

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

[Andrew Somers]

Hey Omar, “multi-threading” is one of those “catch all” terms that people may use to describe software “behavior”, though at its most basic, “multithreading” means that an application/OS/CPU combination are able to process more than one “line” or “piece” of code at a time. Multi-processor means that those multiple threads can be spread over more than one CPU.

Most modern applications are multi threaded and multi-processor aware if for no other reason than the underlying core OS of modern systems are built to be multi-threaded and multi-processor, and applications are really just an extension of the OS’s API. That said, applications can go outside the OS in some areas and optimize their multi-T&P for their own app, whereas the OS is probably thread optimized for “general” computing.

Nevertheless the software might not always take full advantage, and this might be exhibited in its behavior as in GUI lockouts. Some apps are simply stuck in the dark ages — BouJou 5.0.2 has been their “latest version” for over 6 years. It’s a $10,000 tracking app, and is very obviously single processor. Nevertheless under a modern OS like El Capitan it still spawns 28 threads and peaks the CPU at 106% more because the underlying OS and hardware (i.e. CPU) just conduct business that way.

Nevertheless, I’d more or less call BouJou single threaded.

After Effects hasn’t been *that* bad since I think CS1(?) at any rate, it would appear that the multi threading in After Effects is more closely tied to the OS’s MP API, at least until CC15. To improve the performance with machine with more than 2 cores, they added “multi frame” rendering which basically just spawned multiple render nodes in the background to fill up more CPU slots. A multithread of multithreads if you will.

I’m not an engineer for Adobe, but I’d venture that they decided to break away into a new schema starting with CC15 that uses more direct hardware calls instead of API calls, but again this is just a guess on my part..

As to GUI lockup – I honestly don’t think Adobe had a real “need” to lock the GUI since at least CS3. But there might have been some conflict with class libraries, or maybe it was part of a longer term marketing plan. As in “The GUI will lockup during render UNTIL we release our new multi-thread schema” to provide, as always, the continuous incentive to upgrade.

But to call AE single threaded is (for over a decade) pretty plainly wrong.

Andrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com