Slow render after switching to CC + Lion

[Greg Neumayer]

Eric,
There’s no particular reason for me not to get more memory, if it will help.

Beyond that, other than making sure I’m not over-filling my drives, what do you suggest as far as “sorting out” frame caching and data rates/drivers? I’m in unfamiliar territory there. Are you saying the software’s expectation of hardware has moved beyond my hardware and I’d need to have a different drive configuration/upgrade to get back to previous render speeds? What would that look like?

Thanks,
Greg

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com

[Ericbowen]

Number 1 factor with AE and render performance is available ram space and CPU/Threads usable. Those are intertwined as Adobe assigns ram blocks per thread for the frame by frame rendering. This means the caching model used by the player is going reference the codec used and the available ram space. That will be the initialization resources used. The more ram you have the greater amount of Frames AE will grab immediately to start processing frame data. If you increase your ram significantly then that would significantly effect that and the overall render performance. Then comes the data rate the drives can handle starting out and as the render process continues. This will fluctuate but will fluctuate far more with drives close to 100% capacity. That is because the latency on drive requests ie read and write requests significantly increases as the locations for data are spread out over the platter. This tells the application writer which is writing the format files to let the processing application know the data rate it can handle is slowing down. The Processing application will slow down to compensate since ram is limited. This will change the amount of frames cached at one time. If you take a clean HDD or an SSD drive which has latency in microseconds then the file writer will write the data as fast as the application can get it processed. So ideally a SSD drive is perfect for renders but if you cant do that a clean mechanical drive will do provided the codec data rate and data processing doesn’t exceed what the drive can handle. A 2 drive raid 0 is another way to achieve the same performance for render. However anymore an SSD would be ideal since they are so cheap and renders rarely if ever exceed their size.

Summary
Get 24 to 32GB of ram with 32GB the real number you want with 8 Cores.

Clean out Render drive completely or get an SSD render drive. Another option is raid 0 but difficult with mac Pro config space.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager

[Greg Neumayer]

Thanks!
I was holding out for the new macs, but a suped-up ‘mature’ mac is always useful around here too, I suppose.

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com

[Tero Ahlfors]

Are you rendering a 3D comp and is the raytracing engine on? Because if that is accidentally on and you don’t have no GPU acceleration it will be slloooooooooowwww.

[Greg Neumayer]

Oh, man. You’re not kidding. I made that mistake once. Unfortunately, I’ve checked all my cameras already and ruled that out. Also wondered if it was the iris used, but that change (from pentagon to fast rect) seemed negligible.

The really frustrating thing is this computer’s getting old enough (5 yrs) that upgrades cost twice what they should just because it’s getting ‘rare’. Wish I had bought more ram 2 years ago…

Holding my breath until the black garbage can is released,
-Greg

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com