Slow render after switching to CC + Lion

[Todd Kopriva]

> It even imported my preferences

Huh? There is no feature in After Effects for migrating preferences from one version to the next.

I think that you need to confirm that your preferences are as you intend, including in the Memory & Multiprocessing preferences.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Greg Neumayer]

Indeed. Upon a double-check of my caches, they weren’t set to where I thought I had them.

Unfortunately, this hasn’t cleared up the issue.
It spends 80% of it’s time on “Compressing and Writing”.
What part of the render is really happening here? This suggests that a different codec would make all the difference in the world, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Is “compressing and writing” really only that?

Thanks,
Greg

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com

[Todd Kopriva]

That refers to the encoding phase. You said that you had re-enabled the deprecated formats and were using those. Why not use Adobe Media Encoder, which is the recommended approach?

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Greg Neumayer]

Hi Todd,
I’m not sure what you mean by
“you had re-enabled the deprecated formats”
Can you explain?

At any rate, the reason I don’t render from AME is that (in CS6) it frequently crashed, and my understanding was that it didn’t utilize the multiprocessor functions of AE. In short, I understood that it “could” do it, but the only benefit was that I could skip the intermediate render. I also felt like it spent far too much time on the front end establishing dynamic linking (or whatever it was doing).

That said, my experience may be outdated. Is AME the preferred way (by Adobe or by industry) to go when rendering AE?

Thanks,
Greg

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com

[Todd Kopriva]

Oops. I confused your post with another that I had just read, in which the person had re-enabled the H.264 exports out of After Effects, which are disabled by default in After Effects CC (12.0), because the output is much better from AME.

Yes, After Effects renders faster than Adobe Media Encoder, but Adobe Media Encoder encodes much faster and better. Rendering and encoding are the two phases of the exporting process. The ideal workflow is to use After Effects to render and export a single losslessly encoded master file to a watch folder, from which Adobe Media Encoder picks it up and encodes to all of your delivery formats.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Greg Neumayer]

Ah. Thanks.

Also noteworthy (or not):
I noticed that with multi-processor on, the info readout spends much of its time on “Compressing and Writing”, but with it off, it’s constantly blipping between layers and composites, etc. (much more like I would expect).

Do you think this is a slowdown in compression/writing caused by multiprocessing? Or do you think it’s just a non-issue limitation of the info window trying to keep track of multiple processors?

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com

[Greg Neumayer]

So, I haven’t found the culprit yet, but here’s what I’ve (roughly) evaluated without significant improvement (at least nothing close to the rendering performance I had in CS6. My render times have roughly doubled on this project):

No significant change:
Render in CS6 vs CC
Render to same Flash drive as cache (instead of 7500 rpm drive)
ProRes422 vs. DNxHD
Run Disk Util Repair Permissions (restart)
Run most everything in OnyX (restart)
1.5GB/cpu vs. 3GB/cpu

I’ve got 50% space available on my startup & apps drive.
Could having AE on my OSX drive be an issue?

I’ve got >200GB on my (dedicated) cache drive, but it does have some (25GB) temp referenced files in another folder. Could this cause an issue?

I’m rendering to (and the proj is located on) a 2TB SATAII 7200rpm drive with 40GB available. This is plenty for the render, but is not a lot compared to the whole drive. Could this cause any issues? (no caches, apps, or OS on this drive)

Thanks for your input.
-Greg

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com

[Ericbowen]

Mechanical HDD’s start slowing down once you exceed 60% volume capacity. Once you are beyond 80 to 90% the performance has dropped to 60% or less of what the drive is capable off. I suggest you get that drive cleaned out or media moved off. If this is an archive drive then move to a clean drive for renders. SSD drives do not have this limitation and the latency is allot lower. you can have multiple file reads and writes to SSD’s without losing performance. If the Cache drive is greater than 50% utilized capacity, then get that cleaned out as well. What do you have your Multiprocessor settings to in AE CC including ram allocation?

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager

[Greg Neumayer]

Yeah, the next step is clearly making more space, but it doesn’t necessarily explain the sudden change when going to Lion the other day.

I’ve tried a few different MP settings, but right now I’ve got:
Installed 14GB
Reserved for others: 3GB

CPUs: 8
Reserved for others: 2
RAM for Bkgnd: 1.5GB
(Actual CPUs to be used:6)

I also tried Ram:3GB, (actual to be used:2)

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com

[Ericbowen]

Actually yes it does. Adobe changes their caching models for codecs especially with new versions. That is very common now days as new codecs are releasing along with new flavors of codecs. You need to take the drive latency out of the equation. There is also the expected rate of data by the file writer which also changes and can cause the process to slow down considerably especially since the frame caching will be effected by the expected data rate the drive can handle. I would really suggest you get that sorted out.

Change the ram per thread to .75GB. 14GB is really low for a Dual Xeon 8 Core system with AE. Any reason your not running 4GB modules?

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager