When will we see AE 7????

[Steve Roberts]

For now, when you’re rendering, you can use both processors by rendering to an image sequence using two instances of AE simultaneously. Search the COW posts for “instances”.

Steve

[Sean Cusson]

Le Coyote, I just realised that you were responding to the post before mine (by Stolichnaya). Sorry about the misunderstanding (and slight hostility).

Sean Cusson
Q media design
sean@qmediadesign.ca

[Steve Forde]

Not that I will comment on anything that AE 7 will or won’t do, it would seem a little odd that Adobe would endorse Nucleo if there were no gains to be seen with a future release so close according to their website.

From the Nucleo press release…

[Ron Lindeboom]

Hi Steve,

At DV Expo, I had a chance to talk with one of my friends at Adobe about the Nucleo and XFactor plug-ins and to quote them: “It’s funny that I read some people at the Cow saying that they have issues, as I do demo after demo spread across multiple machines and have never had an issue. Even the guys at Pixar tested and were very enthusiastic about XFactor and Nucleo except for one thing: They are written to support smaller studios with 10 or fewer stations in the network; more than ten stations and issues start to arise. But for most of those in the Cow audience who have fewer than ten systems on their backbone and use AE, this is a great tool that is very useful.”

I will spare using their name just in case there is some issue that I am unaware of but I can honestly say that this person — whom I have known and trusted for a long time — was quite enthusiastic about the Gridiron acceleration tools.

Anyway, I just thought I’d throw that onto the stack as that was what I heard at DV Expo 2005 over the last few days.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Steve Forde]

Thanks Ron.

I will say this. X-Factor is not for the faint at heart. Networking, Fonts, Plugins, Data Storage etc, across multiple machines, all have to be singing in tune to see X-Factor really perform. So unless you really know what you are doing on all these fronts, X-Factor may be a little overwhelming.

We are working on an upcoming release to make this more simple to use, and yes…there is a nasty bug that shows its head on very large networks when rendering projects with say 30000 frames in them at 8K resolutions. The next patch fixes these issues.

As for Nucleo, one of the reasons we created it was to provide benefit for “the rest of us”. Dual / Quad CPU machines are becoming the norm, and the performance we can achieve can be quite dramatic with Nucleo.

(Answering another post on this thread’s question)….

AE is a nicely threaded application in terms of multiple processors and rendering (kudos to Adobe), I think since 5.5. Its that most of the effects are not (including AE’s built in effects) . AE’s stellar native capabilities for multi-processing is really how Nucleo can exist. Nucleo focuses on getting all effects and layers etc to properly use all CPU regardless of its optimization level.

Also – a very common theme we heard from users of the free version of X-Factor that came with 6.5 pro, was “would love to try it on more computers, but I just have my workstation”. This is what lead to the creation of Nucleo.

Lastly, as opposed to running multiple instances of AE and using watch folder, Nucleo will optimize the render of movies, image sequences, multiple output modules (watchfolder will not do this in “skip existing frame” mode) and also do RAM, Shift-RAM and Spacebar Previews.

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Ron Lindeboom]

Thanks for your forthrightness and candor, Steve, I am sure that many users here appreciate it.

We have always subscribed to the belief that a sale is not always a good sale if the sale is made to a person whose expectations cannot really be met by the tool they *think* that they have bought. It is always better to be straight with people — especially in these days of the internet — as a buyer who buys based on realistic expectations will be a good and enthusiastic supporter of the tools they use and the company that provides them.

I think you have a real winner in Nucleo as there are many of us here in the Cow who have multiple processor machines that could benefit from Nucleo.

I have been thinking that perhaps we should develop a tutorial for optimising your system for using XFactor, pointing out things like the networking concerns and settings, standardising fonts and plug-ins, how storage effects the pipeline, etc., when using XFactor. Interested in helping us develop a tutorial like this? I think it would be very beneficial for our members.

Thanks, Steve, for participating here in the Cow.

Best always,

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Ron Lindeboom]

[Le Coyote] “Of course AE already uses 2 CPUs. At least when rendering. It’s not using the full power in EVERY situation, but most of it. The Gridiron plugin helps when network rendering, which is not the same thing as having multiprocessors on the same computer.”

For those using multiple processors in the same machine, including multi-core processors, Gridiron has created the Nucleo

[Glen Perez]

so why adobe does not create a norm where creating aftrer effects plugins needs to cover minimum requirements so that everything that gets inside after effects (i mean plugins, etc) will use all the power your machine hides….