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New Desktop For After Effects
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[Omar Wanis] “How’s AE multithreaded? Everywhere i see people talk on it being single threaded software.”
That’s why I spoke up. There’s a lot of misinformation flying around and, while Andrew is aware of the differences, a lot of other people aren’t. So, for the sake of future forum viewers, I had to say something.
[Omar Wanis] “Is it multithreaded in one task like rendering or previewing? Or doing multiple tasks at the same time?”
It is multithreaded in everything it does inasmuch as the renderer and UI are on different threads. So…it’s always in multiple threads. While rendering and previewing, it is also multithreaded. Some effects are more multithreaded than others. For an example I mentioned earlier, if you compare the rendering of the grain effects in earlier versions to the latest update, there can be a 5x difference in the speed (again, depending on your hardware) because they made the multithreading a lot better. Some tasks, as has been pointed out, are still single-threaded. So…it’s not a straightforward answer.
Software like this is complicated. ????[Omar Wanis] “And is it effective as multi-threading in 3D softwares like Houdini, or it has many limitations?”
Houdini also has its limitations and things that run on a single thread too. There are only so many things that can run in parallel, some stuff has to happen in sequence.
I grabbed a screenshot last night of my home computer while I was rendering in AE CC 2018, but I forgot to put it somewhere where I could get to it this morning to show you! Anyway, you can see all of the threads spinning up and doing different levels of activity. So, they were all doing different tasks at once and they were all working. Granted, they weren’t all hitting 100% – the whole CPU system was hovering around 50% power, but I have a dual Xeon system, so there were a lot of cores going at once.
[Andrew Somers] “Are those CUDA specific? Because I thought the trend was to go to Open CL, instead of being tied to nVidia.”
As Walter says, on PC, they can use CUDA (and that’s usually the fastest option if you have an NVIDIA card), but they’ll also work with OpenCL on NVIDIA or AMD cards and, on Macs, they can do OpenCL or Metal (and with each new version of AE, the Metal implementation is improving).
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(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.
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While the multithreading conversation is interesting and valuable in its own right, I think it presents an easy trap to fall into: talking about theoretical architecture instead of real-world performance.
Puget Systems has published a lot of good research on After Effects performance. Maybe start here:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Adobe-After-Effects-CC-144/Hardware-RecommendationsWalter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
After Effects turned 25 this year. That’s a long legacy! Doing something as “simple” as separating the UI from the renderer meant re-writing core functionality — like the entire preview system — that has been in place for a long time.
Multithreading lets you do more than one task in parallel — but everything Ae used to do with respect to project state was done serially. First you update state in the UI, then you render, then you return control. Separating the UI and the renderer introduces the need for flawlessly reliable, high-performance synchronization of project state between the UI and the renderer. With the complicated nature of Ae itself, plus multiple platforms to target, rapid framework churn on the macOS side, and a whole galaxy of third-party plug-ins to support, you can imagine there are any number of things that could go wrong.
Very few people appreciate the difficulty of re-engineering After Effects without breaking compatibility or blowing up the UX — but Adobe is (slowly) getting it done.
Some of the loudest voices on this forum have spent the last few years slamming the developers, with little understanding of what the development team is actually doing. It’s easy for a user to minimize the challenge of modernizing a legacy application like Ae and laying the groundwork for its next 25 years, but this is a little bit like popping the hood and changing out the engine while someone’s driving the car on the highway.
Do I want to see higher performance and better resource utilization from After Effects? Absolutely! But seeing some of the work that Adobe is releasing — extending RAM caches to the global performance cache, building effects that run footage analysis in the background, separating the UI from the renderer, building a vendor-neutral GPU pipeline, turning the world upside-down with Master Properties, getting the CINEMA 4D renderer into Ae, adding “little” polish features that we can use every day — that keeps me excited for the future!
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Walter Said:
Doing something as “simple” as separating the UI from the renderer meant re-writing core functionality
Hey Walter, I hope I didn’t come across as bashing Adobe, since I am a fan for the most part. I also didn’t intend to trivialize any development issues with separating UI from other functions — When I said Adobe didn’t “need” to free the GUI anymore, I meant that the capability in the OS and Hardware layers was there to accommodate such a change. Nevertheless I understand that priorities on “what features to develop in a next upgrade” are a complicated process based on available resources, user demands, competing products, etc. etc.
All tools have issues and workarounds — it’s just a matter of picking the right set for the tasks at hand.
Adobe Ae/Ps/Ai/Pr + MochaPro + C4D is a pretty comprehensive set of tools that I happen to like, and know the pitfalls and workarounds therein.
Andrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com -
Yes thank you sir! That’s what i have been trying to understand.
I read the whole Puget Systems article and seen other videos/forums on the matter before i posted here, and they all seemed to agree that AE works better on a high frequency lower core counts CPU and everyone is listing the i7-8700k as a DeFacto in almost every build i have seen.They never explained the multithreading to me like u guys did, thank you for that, but they all plainly said AE is a single-threaded software so don’t waste money on more cores that u are not gonna get much use out of (unless u go for Render Garden).
Also they all recommended not going for a very high end GPU (unless i have the money for it), and better save the extra cache for CPU, RAM and even SSDs.
So when i had my build in mind, i wanted to make sure evth was correct, every piece played nicely with the others and if there will be misplaced cach on pieces of hardware that i could have replaced with other better stuff.Also i was asking about workstations because computer engineers in my country are pretty much dumb, they dun understand half of what u guys said and i won’t be able to get any good recommendations out of any of them really so i need a detailed easy thing to build yet worth its money because 2000$ in here is worth 40k of our currency and that’s a lot! So i can’t tolerate making mistakes in this one really ????
Thank you guys!
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Of course, Andrew! And I don’t mean to go to Pollyanna myself. Adobe deserves a good bashing every now and again.
This thread about threads just seemed a good jumping-off point to talk about some of the technical challenges of modernizing a 25-year old application — there have been a lot of other conversations here that dramatically oversimplified the work necessary.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Hi Omar,
Keep in mind that a lot of the render engines for C4D rely on multiple CPU cores, and rendering CGI is one place where more cores really really counts (which is why CUDA/OPENCL renderers are so much the rage now).
That said, your CPU: Intel Core i7-8700k (3.7 GHz, turbo 4.7 GHz – 6 cores) & RAM: 32 GB DDR4 should be more than fine for non-multiframe rendering in AE.
Not sure about prices in your country, but here in the US, prices for the 1070 are pretty close to the 1060, and the 1070 has twice the core count. If you can swing a little more, I highly encourage the 1070 as any process that takes advantage of CUDA or OpenCL will benefit. This many many of the built in AE effects, the ray tracer, and for C4D ProRender which is included, not to mention Octane and Redshift.
In fact, so much of this kind of processing is moving toward the GPU, I’d think that is the best place to put a little extra. both in cores and GPU Ram.
As I think about it. I’d make the better graphics card a higher priority than a PCIe SSD. If you had to get a SATA SSD to be able to get the 1070, then I think you’d be happier with the overall performance and render speeds for everything that is (increasingly so) GPU based.
Andrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com -
I agree with Andrew. I’d prioritize GPU (and RAM!) before PCIe-connected storage.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
I understand, thank you all very much for taking time and explaining all these things to me, very much appreciated!
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If you’re just doing it as a hobby and occasional freelancing you don’t need a very high end workstation. If you’re worried about compatibility, websites like https://pcpartpicker.com/ help you put together a list of compatible parts and also have other people’s completed build with reviews about how it’s working. I’ve used that a few times as a guide for buying parts. If you’re not doing long, 4k+ work you should have no trouble buying a good machine with your budget.
It’s worth checking out the ryzen processors too these days, imho. The 1700 series did very well, it’s generally lower ghz but more processors. You might be able to get a better deal as they’re usually a bit cheaper than Intel. But if you’re not going to be doing anything too crazy the original build you posted should be fine. You can always upgrade down the road.
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