[Scott Reus]

It was definitely the amount of pre-comps that was killing it. I just went back and checked, and there were over 300 layers. I always thought that only the layers being displayed demanded the horsepower- and so the amount of other layers wouldn’t matter- but that’s apparently not the case. I’ve completed several other smaller jobs and they were all pretty zippy, and definitely faster than my 2008 MacPro. 🙂

Pre-rendering definitely helps. And the multiprocessing settings that Walter recommend made a big difference, too.

I actually received an email directly from an Adobe rep after my similar post on the We Want A New Mac Pro FB page. Lou Borella, the site’s owner, was able to hook that up for me. He mentioned as well that they will be focussing on performance in the upcoming year, and said, specifically, they were looking to separate the render thread from the UI thread, which is great. I look forward to that update alone.

Thanks again, everyone, for your responses.

[Scott Reus]

Right, gotcha. Yes, Multiple-Frames checked, Only for Render Queue not checked.

I just tried to RAM Preview 5 seconds of the comp. There are maybe 20 active layers in those 5 seconds, half of them control layers, the rest 3d text with a camera. No lights. No motion blur. It took 10 seconds to begin the RAM Preview. Once it started it was quick. With motion blur turned on, though, the RAM Preview didn’t start 40+ seconds, and once it did, it was not quick.

This is not normal, right? Shouldn’t I expect speed with this set up?

I used to work with a lady that could break computers just by being near them. I think I may have caught what she had. -s

[Scott Reus]

Thanks Walter, I will definitely take your advice on that. The link about optimum memory settings was great, better than what I found on my own. I really hope they do address speed in 2014.

[Walter Soyka] “It is possible to use MP for RAM previews, though this is not the default. If you have it enabled, starting the RAM preview will take a while before any progress can be amde as all the background instances of the renderer must start up and load the project, media, and caches.”

Where do I change this in the preferences? It sounds like one of my issues…

Cheers, -s

[Scott Reus]

Thanks for your reply, Erik. I had AMD cards on the last one, too, so I’ve never used ray-tracing. I’ve double and triple-checked, though, just to see if that’s what was causing it. Of course, that would be too easy. I’ll do some tests and see what happens.

It’s hard to believe a machine this robust can’t crunch through the GUI more efficiently. Or that AE is really that bad. That combined with the long RAM previews and my experience is almost identical to that of my 2008 MP… except I have a lot more desk space.

Does anybody else out there with a new Mac Pro have some AE experiences they can share? Specifically with the GUI, RAM previews or rendering? Rock solid? Fast? Slow? I’m not sure if I should reinstall everything or just lower my expectations back down to where they were in 2008…

Thanks, -s

[Scott Reus]

Thx for your reply. Yeah, I thought something similar. I exported the GB file from QT Pro 7 (so much more functional than 10!) to a 48kHz song to test that but it still didn’t do it. Though, I finally did get it working again. I can’t recall the exact combination of things that resolved it, but, you’re right, some combination of restarting my machine and creating a new sequence, then copying and pasting the old sequence into the new sequence seemed to do the trick.

Thanks for your help! -s

[Scott Reus]

Did you ever figure this out? I’m having the same problem in CS5.5 importing to PP from Garageband.

All my music plays significantly slower, and so the pitch is significantly lower, in the timeline. I swear it wasn’t doing this earlier today… Ideas? The music is 48kHz and so is the timeline. Thx, -s