[Clive Barry]

Balls… you were indeed correct: RAM preview sped up by 1% reading assets off ssd as opposed to the hdd rendering the above hi-res psd layer-heavy animation.

Thanks Walter, you hit the nail and explained it really well. Was actually hoping you’d respond — the glasses make you appear very studious.

CPU usage wasn’t as low as I’d stated, it averaged about 47%. So, that isn’t terrible. ALL about the processor then [and a fast cache drive]!!

Cheers lads

[Clive Barry]

Blimey… what an excellent response!!

Unfortunately it’s the former: many simultaneous loading of PSD layers is what I deal with. Not the sequential loading of PSD layers, so, as you say, beyond the first frame it won’t speed up.

I’m using very high res PSD’s that begin as detailed drawings. Many multi-layered PSD’s at once, used for backdrop, characters etc (e.g. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hUnwSgovO7U ). Backdrop ~12000px wide, Character ~6000px tall. Both made from a gang of layers

I made the above animation with the following spec:
AE 2014
FX-8350 cpu
32GB ddr3 ram

It was positively torporous to do a ram preview of even a few seconds, as it is so detailed. Reducing the preview resolution sped this up, so I suppose this goes along with Tero’s assertion of the cpu bottleneck (since it’s making an initial lower res cache at the first frame, then there is less to process on subsequent frames).

My only counter to this is the fact the cpu usage in task manager rarely goes above 30%… But I’ve read this is AE itself not handling multithreading efficiently.

I’m going to upgrade to a new computer, with dual xeons… hopefully AE can get it’s act together and fully embrace multi-threading!! Puget Systems have written an article detailing the ridiculously high diminishing returns on upping your core count… but surely someday Adobe will fix this??

By the way, have you fellows got hold if AE 2016 yet? Is it better at using all the cpu cores?

Think I’ll also do an identical test RAM preview of a project on my boggy hdd and then repeat it with assets shifted to the ssd — I’m sure there’ll be no gains but can’t hurt to test. Will take bloody ages as my projects are so damn complex and bulky… But I’ll return with my findings.

Thanks so much!

Klyve

[Clive Barry]

Nahh… no fly by nights man. You need a little specialist knowledge to hook them up your pci-e correctly, so maybe the vendors you might come across are rather no frills as they’re catering to full blown geeks.

Here in the UK they’re sold by scan.co.uk… https://www.scan.co.uk/products/256gb-samsung-sm951-m2-(22×80)-pcie-30-(x4)-ahci-ssd-mlc-nand-read-2150mb-s-write-1200mb-s-90k-70k-i

But there’s no reason not to get one from hong kong or wherever

[Clive Barry]

Will you take Hot Wheels?

SSD’s are plummeting in price… starving artists like me can still afford an ‘SM951’ for example.

[Clive Barry]

Just an little update: Puget Systems, who seem to know AE inside out [and it’s various hardware failings, especially with multi-threading] say “A large secondary SSD is great for your active projects as well as being the location of your disk cache”.

[Clive Barry]

You are entirely correct — had the freeform layer set as a 3d layer… ordure for brains!