[Stephen Christie]

Agreed. I am very careful about not switching versions during a project, unless there is some absolute need, and even then backups are your friend. Our studio is still locked to 2014 until the patches solidify things.

Recently Adobe put out an update for Premiere 2014 (8.2), and once you opened your file in it, you couldn’t open it again in a previous update (8.0.1), which can make sharing files or working on different machines tricky.

I hope reworking AE isn’t similar to when Autodesk reworked 3DS Max 2012. It was greatly disliked (putting it mildly) and it took a couple of versions before the stability and performance got back to where people trusted it again. In the long run they really moved the app forward, but it had some growing pains. Hopefully AE’s issues won’t be as severe, but the slow “live” preview has me concerned.

Stephen Christie
Technical Lead, New Media
Tasc Studios | Tasc, Inc.

[Stephen Christie]

Just in case anyone else is dealing with this, I just found out that Premiere CC 2014 with the 8.2 update creates files that cannot be opened in 8.0.

So you’ll have to update to 8.0.1 or newer to open them. It’s an unusual issue because we’re not talking about a full version difference, we’re talking about incompatibility within the same version, just different patches.

I don’t know if this helps you William, since you said just CC, but it might be the same problem for CC.

Stephen Christie
New Media Lead
Tasc Studios | Tasc, Inc.

[Stephen Christie]

The Thunderbolt 2 setup might work for us, I’ll talk it over with our studio manager.

That’s interesting news about the Adobe team working on the Render Simultaneously. I wish we could hold out and wait to see what develops, but we need to order because the funds are here now.

I’m going to apply your advice more towards our 3D servers that will be Xeon based. Those are CPU-based because it is a lot of Max scanline/Mental Ray rendering. We are looking at dual Titans on it in case we pick up a GPU renderer like Octane or Furry Ball, and also for it’s iRay renderer.

Then if someday AE does address all cores, I could always pass over my AE file to the server to render out.

I’m leaning to a single Titan on the AE box, since most of what I need is driven by CPU. That way I’ll still have a GPU that plugins like Element 3D can utilize, and will give me good viewports in Max, but it’s not overkill.

I’m not sure 980’s are ready for prime time, I just got my MSI 980 GTX at home, and I’m suddenly dealing with blue screens in After Effects, especially if I try to load Raytraced scenes. Someone else reported the same with a 970. It’s too new of a card; they just fixed a problem where it would crash if you had 32 GB of ram or greater.

[Stephen Christie]

Yes, I just bought the card, so I have the latest drivers. Actually, I updated them when I had the 660, they are the same apparently.

I kept getting issues with AE CS6, so I went into the raytrace text file and removed 980 from it, and it’s working fine now and not crashing or giving errors like before, but obviously I can’t raytrace including this thread’s benchmark. Which sadly, was one of the things I was looking forward to the most when I got the card.

For those curious, I did benchmark using 3D Mark, and had a 300% increase.

Stephen Christie
New Media Lead
Tasc Studios | Tasc, Inc.

[Stephen Christie]

Thanks for your continued input Chris. This last bit is quite a jump, I’ll try to figure out what this all entails.

I’m surprised you feel that way about the 5960X, I’ve understood the hex and octa cores to be professional grade, since games don’t address past quad. But if you’re comparing to a Xeon set up I can see why.

I’ve read that it’s better to get a hex or octa core because most of the time you’re working with a single core and you want it as fast as possible. I’ve also read that Adobe doesn’t optimize past quad or hex core (I assume they would start for octa now). Many Mac Pro users complain that they don’t see the optimization of their cores past 4 or so. Do you feel that’s inaccurate? Or different on a PC platform?

I’m not concerned about sound via PCI-e, and will be outputting to a Novation Scarlett 2i4 via USB.

One point of confusion, you mention, “Samsung XP941 PCIe x4 M.2 SSD 1.16 GB/s instead of a evo at 540mb/s…”, but when I look that up it’s RAM, right? So I don’t quite understand why you’re comparing it to the Evo SSD.
*Edit – I see now that it’s actually an SSD, I’ve never seen this type before.

For video cards I mention 1 Titan Black vs. 2 980 GTXs, or possibly 2 Titan Blacks if there is enough justification for it.

Get rid of the iron drive means all SSD? So would that be like 4 of 1 TB drives in a RAID 5?
*Edit – Now that I know that the M.2 is, did you mean a RAID of these? Would that in an external chassis, or plugged right into the motherboard? We chassis all of our drives to swap them out for projects and customers, so if it’s not easy to swap, I might hit a wall here.

Haven’t clicked buy yet, trying to gather info to submit for approval early next week. We are also spec’ing a 3D render server, which sounds closer to what you’ve listed, but you’re definitely opening my eyes to some new ways of thinking.

[Stephen Christie]

I saw that Ian, you had said to match the card’s ID string in GPU-Z.

Did you mean the first field, “Name”? If so, it is actually different in than the other GTX cards in that for my 660 I have the AE text file showing, “GeForce GTX 660”, and it’s like that for all GeForce cards.

But the GPU-Z Name string says, “NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980”, so it’s different. But I tried that and still got a blue screen. I’m not sure if that’s what you meant though.

Stephen Christie
New Media Lead
Tasc Studios | Tasc, Inc.

[Stephen Christie]

I just installed my MSI 980 GTX card, it runs great with AE, Element 3D (sped up e3D render test by 300%, 3 mins instead of 9 mins for 660 GTX), Plexus, and 3DS Max so far.

But when I tried to run the raytrace benchmark test in CS6 I got a bluescreen twice, I don’t think I’ve ever had a bluescreen in AE, at least it’s very rare.

So I remembered before that I had to manually add the hack for my old 660 GTX, so I did the same for the 980, but then when I restarted AE I got: 5070:12, and alternating 5070:1 or 5070:2 errors.

I tried CC and CC 2014, and got the same errors (although I didn’t use the hack for them, I don’t think it’s needed).

Does anyone have any ideas?

[Stephen Christie]

Raids are a bit tricky in our studio environment, but not out of the question. Were you thinking the raid was for the OS, the cache, or the data drive?

I believe Brute Force is a Vray thing? We would like to have Vray, but haven’t gotten there yet. For this machine, the primary goal is to make AE and it’s plugins as fast as possible. So the focus is on CPU, but set up also for GPU for when it can be used.

I think you’re saying I need to make sure the bus speed of the motherboard is a good match for the speed of the ram?

Digital Storm had recommended 32 GB of 2800 MHz ram, 64 only comes in 2666 MHz, but from everything that I’ve read, more ram is better for AE.