[James Osbun]

Hi Joey,

Found this trying to solve my own problems. Wanted to know how you got Hot4D out the the horizon… are you simply faking it, keeping the camera low to the water surface, or have you found a nice way to get the water out that far?

[James Osbun]

New result with dual GTX 580s 3GB RAM each.

2 min 52 sec

[James Osbun]

Hi Walter,

Thanks for the input. I just spent an hour testing and have come to the following preliminary conclusion:

First and foremost the efficiency of Multiprocessing within After Effects varies greatly depending on what is happening within a comp. The same goes for the Background Renderer. At times the BGR is much more efficient, however, I just seemed to find a sweet spot for in-AE MP during this test I ran using a large jpg and effecting it with the Ball Action and Add Grain effects. The AE-based render was capable of using over 50% of my computer resources as seen here:

*Quick note: that middle render that I stopped after 9 minutes – it still had 18 more minutes to go and that was with MP turned off and not using BGR. So MP really killed ‘normal’ rendering by about 12x in this case.

That sweet spot MP render finished in just over 2 minutes, as opposed to around 5 for non-sweetspot Multi-processing settings and the Background Render. The BGR, however, is quite effective with plugins such as Trapcode. I will likely test more, but for now that is what I’ve got.

Cheers.

[James Osbun]

Hi Chris,

It will depend on your computer. For me, AE is sketchy in terms of resource utilization. Granted, I am offering it a lot power and even when it takes just a little of it its not too slow. However, the BG Renderer is a good option for me because it was coded to essentially fill in those gaps if need be.

If you were rendering an image sequence as your final output, you could start multiple instances of BGR and each one would use more and more of your computers resources up to 100% and leap frog render frames. You cannot do that if you are rendering to video, obviously, but for me, I just upped the settings a little and one instance of BGR will use 90-100% of my power and blast through a render in 30 minutes that AE wanted 2.5 hours on.

I cannot promise anything to anyone else other than I am telling you the truth when it comes to my experience. Let me know if you have any other questions. Happy to offer up so good info.

[James Osbun]

Ive not used this function before as I typically avoid DLs, but is there any button/overlay-method that condenses all your roto? It may simply be that AE wasn’t coded well in this area and isn’t capable of putting everything together….? I’ve not had much stability with DLs, so this doesn’t surprise me. Anyway, just a thought.

[James Osbun]

HI ALL:

So after a day of ‘foruming’ regarding AE not using the resources my computer offers it, the following is the result:

Todd Kopriva over on Adobe’s Forum says:

“There’s no further insight to give, other than perhaps to tell you that we currently have a large fraction of our team working on making all of After Effects behave better (i.e., faster) in this area.

No promises, but we’re hoping to have something to show next year.”

In short, Adobe is aware of this issue and is working to fix it. While I am super happy to hear that, I must add that it confuses me that the BG Renderer Script https://aescripts.com/bg-renderer/ for less than $40 is capable of utilizing 100% of my machine and AE is more often than not, lucky to break 50% on a render and 10% when working in-comp.

Anyway, let’s wish Adobe the best and pray for sooner rather than later, b/c sitting at a computer for longer than necessary is just unnecessary.

[James Osbun]

Hi Oliver,

Seems like you and I have similar questions. I too have a powerful computer that seemingly is not utilized by AE. Another similar point is that we are both using Trapcode Particular.

I have found Particular to be the source of my slow render problems, although that doesn’t fix that AE wont use the resources of the computer to render… even without Trapcode AE seems to use a small fraction of what it could. If it would use my 24 cores and 64GB of RAM, I’m sure it wouldn’t be nearly so slow… right?

My threads are:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/1043751 and
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1327782?tstart=0

If you have found an answer please let me know. I’ll do the same.

[James Osbun]

Hi Jim, I thought the same thing, but:

“Faster rendering in Version 2
The new version can render hundreds of thousands of particles per second by taking advantage of multi-core processors. The new 3D renderer delivers full shading of particles, and yet the engine can be up to twice as fast as previous versions.”

It is supposed to utilize multiple cores without issue.

[James Osbun]

I have done a few things this afternoon to test ways to speed the render time:

#1: I swapped .psd files in for the .jpg files and when I rendered, the time was pretty much the same. Negligible difference.

#2: I removed a Trapcode Particular layer and the render was very fast. 3 seconds. Obviously, the 30-40 additional seconds of calculation are caused by this…. I then put it back in and lowered the particle amount by quite a large portion and the render dropped down to 12 seconds, which is far better, but I am still very confused as to why Trapcode only uses one core to run a calculation.

[James Osbun]

Thanks Paul. As I mentioned I will try some more adjustments this afternoon; one being a .psd file with the 20k images.

I just now disabled Multiprocessing and rendered a frame. Same situation as before though. One CPU at a time handled the render over 40 seconds.

It would be nice to know how AE handles compression within its memory/disk cache operations. I’ve also posted to Adobe forums, so if anyone over there has an answer I’ll be sure to update here.