render taking too long (i think) lets get geeky!

Adobe After Effects

render taking too long (i think) lets get geeky!

Posted by Craig Hellen on April 29, 2013 at 5:37 pm

Hi Guys

So i have a render using a topological map kinda like this one: https://www.123rf.com/photo_11125469_abstract-topographical-map-with-no-names.html

i have a camera moving over the map to pick up text and other items in 3d space.

The map itself is an illustrator layer and as you may realise its quite a complex vector.

It takes about 5 seconds a frame to render in half hd res, which seems a little much because I have a fairly beefy system, 8 core macpro (nahlem), gtx 480 cuda supported, 24 gig of ram, a decent ssd.

I have checked multiple frame rendering using 2 gig per core reserving 2 cores for the rest of the system.

Any ideas of what to do? how to speed things up?

Best and thanks,

Craig

Co-Director Podchains Ltd
Video Producer / Motion graphics designer https://bexmedia.net

Walter Soyka replied 13 years ago 4 Members · 4 Replies
4 Replies

Todd Kopriva
April 29, 2013 at 7:09 pm

5 seconds per frame doesn’t sound like a long time for 3D animations with complex vector assets.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t some tweaking that you might be able to do somewhere to make it faster, but on the face of it that doesn’t sound long. I’ve got a render happening right now on a similarly powerful machine that is taking ~30 seconds per frame. (It’s a 3D fly-through.)

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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Craig Hellen
April 30, 2013 at 2:59 pm

Thanks for the reply!

I worked out what my issue was, iw as doing 20 samples of motion blur on the comp, bumped that down a tad and it works much nicer!

Out of interest, currently my media cache is on the same SSD as my os, would getting a separate SSD for media cache significantly improve things?

Co-Director Podchains Ltd
Video Producer / Motion graphics designer https://bexmedia.net
Tom Daigon
April 30, 2013 at 3:38 pm

I keep my Media cache on my fastest drive and not on my OS disk. In my case its an external PCI-E raid.

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64GB ram
Dulce DQg2 16TB raid
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
Walter Soyka
May 1, 2013 at 1:12 am

[craig hellen] “Out of interest, currently my media cache is on the same SSD as my os, would getting a separate SSD for media cache significantly improve things?”

How saturated is your disk?

You said you wanted to get geeky. Open up Terminal, type “sudo iopending” and tell me how long the disk queue gets while you’re rendering.

The system should not be keeping the disk that busy, so my guess is that you would not see significant improvement in cache performance unless you also have a memory problem causing significant disk access for virtual memory use — and then the problem is memory, not the cache. Watch Activity Monitor’s System Memory tab during a render. If you’re seeing page outs while rendering, your memory settings are probably too aggressive.

In my opinion, the better reason to get a dedicated cache SSD is dedicated space, not fewer IOPS.

Personally, I’d suggesting tweaking your Ae Memory & Multiprocessing settings. You can sometimes get better results with fewer cores using more RAM than more cores using less RAM.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

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