Question about performance and optimization

[Kevin Camp]

how are you previewing… spacebar or zero on the numbers pad? use zero on the numbers pad to create a ram preview, this will cache as much of the render as ae can fit in your ram cache (usually 60% of max ram). once cached, the playout should be realtime.

another thing that will effect ae performance is the codec used for the media file… if you clip is using a codec like mpeg-2, h.264, hdv or any other codecs that use temporal (interframe, or b or p frame) compression then ae will struggle to play back the footage (good for nles, bad for compositors). you’ll get best performance using uncompressed or losslessly compressed footage, but even lossy intraframe codecs like dv, hvcprohd and photo-jpeg will perform well.

with 2gb of ram, you are a little strapped in ae… ae is a ram hog. if you wanted to enable multiprocessing, it would love to have 2gb per processing core just for itself (you might like to have a little extra for the os). of course, if you want to use more than 4gb in a pc, you’ll also need a 64-bit windows (pick your flavor).

[John Frank] “When I’m in Vegas I can apply Gaussian and have it play pretty fast…”

vegas is probably using gpu acceleration for blurs and color adjustments and such… if you were only going to use ae for effects like that, i ‘might’ suggest that you enable opengl in the preview preferences and set accelerate previews with opengl… i say ‘might’ because opengl is a little flakey and there are only 20 or so effects that come with ae that can use opengl (although comps settings like motion blur and blending modes are also accelerated). obviously, if all you wanted was color grading and blurs, you’d use vegas…

also note that opengl and multiprocessing are not compatible in ae, so if you enable opengl for previews, you disable multiprocessing for previews. personally i keep it off, but i also have 8-cores and 12gb or ram.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Brendan Coots]

Ditto on all of the above, esp. the part about codecs. If your files are HDV, convert them to Animation Codec or something before using in After Effects – or any editing app, for that matter – HDV is a shooting codec, not a post codec and AE usually chokes on it pretty hard.

If you do a proper RAM preview it SHOULD play every frame, even if it can only preview a few seconds. That said, dual core with 2GB RAM is a little underpowered for HD work, especially when you are adding calculation-intense effects like Gaussian Blur.

Try using Fast Blur instead, it is basically the same exact visual result but with much less computational load.

Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com

[John Frank]

I tried the fast blur and I got 6 frames every second (note: When I press numpad0 (ram preview) it renders the preview that slow, but after it’s loaded it plays back fine)

I’m using uncompressed / lagerith lossless files, just was wondering if it was normal for my computer specs lol

anyway this program rocks! I was watching some of the tutorials on the adobe site, and wow it’s limitless