[John Hsu]

I now this is an old post, but just thought I would add my 2 cents for reference.

In my experience exporting PNG seq for things like animation and rendering has been the best way for me when creating intermediate files and final deliverables to clients.

The only real thing to consider when you use PNG is bit depth. Default PNG is 8-bit and you can up it to 16-bit (Trillions of Colors+) but if you are doing any kind of processing that would require 32-bits (HDR maps for 3D rendering, archival raw video footage) that’s when you would look at TIFF.

[John Hsu]

So I actually went ahead and upgraded to After Effects CC, figured might as well try it out while I’m at it.

I tried different variations of memory & multiprocessing settings, and I have to say the best render time I got was closing all other applications and maxing out the memory and multiprocessing settings:

After all things said and done render time went down to 12 hours:

When I increased RAM reserved for other applications, CPUs reserved for other applications, and RAM allocation per background CPU 1 notch, it increased render times to 22 hours.

It’s good to figure out my work-flow for now, I guess I’ll just stick to SD while I’m experimenting, but for future reference any suggestions on how to prioritize hardware upgrades and realistic expectations for render time improvements?

Benchmarks are useful, but any suggestions on how to identify bottlenecks with performance? CPU, RAM, Hard Drive Speed, RAID Setup? I guess also in respect to processing this type of filter.

Any input is appreciated.

[John Hsu]

That’s great, thanks for the quick reply!

[John Hsu]

I ran this benchmark and got 6:30 min with multiprocessing on, but when I turned MP off it rendered in 3 sec, anybody know what’s going on?

Adobe After Effects CS6 (v11.0.0.378)
Intel i7-3770
3.4GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570
4 core (8 virtual)
16 GB RAM
Windows 7

[John Hsu]

Thanks for the help!

[John Hsu]

Well it looks like ramping the effect down seems to have a good effect. At 70 sec displacement the render time dropped to 9 hours, and now I just turned it down even further to 40 sec and the render time has dropped to 2 hours!

Luckily this is just an experiment and I put an ease on the changes so the transitions look pretty good.

I had actually read through that page earlier, I guess I should be more specific by asking why does the render times take such a huge hit when turning on Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously. I assumed from thread that my problem might be that the disk drive was not reading & writing fast enough:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/994293#994301

I also forgot to mention that when I had RMFS on, in the rendering panel information drop down it would appear to hang up on the ‘reading&writing’ stage.

Maybe I should start a separate thread for this question?

[John Hsu]

Well, I stopped the render, and am ramping down the effect resolution to 30fps and the time displacement to 70 sec, I guess I’ll see in 60 frames if that makes a difference or not.

Meanwhile I am a little foggy on understanding where the cache should be stored. Should I put it on my operating disk or data disk if I only have 2 disks.

Also, would getting a third drive to write output files to allow me to use multiprocessing?

[John Hsu]

Oops, uploaded the images as files by accident. Here they are as image links.

[John Hsu]

Perhaps I should add for the time displacement settings I have the offset set at 120 seconds and the resolution at 80 fps.