[Alex Ezorsky]

You…will…not…believe what seems to be the issue.

BOLD FONT

I checked every possible difference between my student’s version and mine and the only difference was that mine used the bold font button in the character panel. I turned the bold off and voila realtime playback!

Is this not insane? Can you test on your machine if lets say a paragraph of text animated with lets say the “smooth move in” animation preset previews slower with the BOLD effect turned on in the character panel?

I’ve got these pics to prove it. Including a pic of my version (15.01). Do you think the 424 plugins is a problem? It’s a fresh install.

[Alex Ezorsky]

Sorry for my strange wording, I meant the keyframe enable stopwatch on the child was turned off (not enabled) to prove it wasn’t a compounding issue with the child having it’s own keyframes

[Alex Ezorsky]

I’ve done some more testing and it seems related to the fact that the two layers have non proportional scaled attributes that the scale deformation compounds when parenting. Hmn…still looking for solutions.

[Alex Ezorsky]

Great question Dave, and the answer is to my semi-surprise 4k prores is just barely usable. Playback only drops a few frames. As soon as I add effects though it chokes.

[Alex Ezorsky]

Thanks y’all!

Makes me feel more comfortable with the switch to the new imac pro ;)!

[Alex Ezorsky]

No it’s not a rendering issue. I’ve also tried turning GPU acceleration (OpenCL) on and off and it doesn’t change the results. Again both sequences have the exact same clips in them which is what makes this so mind boggling.

Thanks for the help though!

[Alex Ezorsky]

Hey thanks for your suggestion Mark. I tried converting from PSD to PNG and it didn’t help. BUT!!!!…..

With some tests I found out the very interesting fact that it’s not the resolution of the source media that’s necessarily the problem, its the size of the composition it’s in.

THE TEST: I made a fairly complex 3D animation of 28 duplicates of a 5K image around the Y axis and pre-comped them, collapsed transformations and animated it rotating. It took about 1 second per frame to render.

Then just as a test I pre-comped the base .psd layer (with leave attributes) and replaced all the base layers with this pre-comp. No surprise, it didn’t change the render time.

BUT! when I reduced the size of this base layer pre-comp down to just the area of the image with alpha (mind you I am cutting out invisible pixels but only via comp size, NOT replacing the image file) then went back to the top comp, cleared the media and disk cache, and rendered again, render times were cut in half!

WILD!

LESSON LEARNED: Use base layer comps to crop your footage/images in order to reduce render times!

It would be great to hear if others get the same results.

[Alex Ezorsky]

This script did exactly what I needed for my characters ability to come to a slow stop in a walking loop. But what if I want them to slowly start up again? It seems like once you add the second keyframe it kills all activity afterwards.

Thanks!

[Alex Ezorsky]

Dan thanks for your help but I think I realized that the increased render times weren’t associated with simply the expression. They were associated with the fact that the expression separated the videos greatly in time. I ended up with the same issue when simply removed the expression and then moved the layers horizontally to separate the times. I guess it’s pretty obvious that AE doesn’t have to work as hard when layers are showing the exact same thing at the same time.

Thanks though.

[Alex Ezorsky]

I came to this thread with the same question and just found that you can batch rename by highlighting multiple clips and entering in a new clip name in the metadata panel. The downside is that it will give all the clips the same name and doesn’t seem to have any feature for dynamic batch naming such as adding a suffix.

I hope this helps but of course would love to know if there’s a better way.