[Steve Forde]

Thought I would chime in here from a software development perspective. An application like AE is extremely rich with all the various things one “could” do. That said, it can also go in a about a million different directions with each new release.

AFTER you have tried out AE 7, go to: https://www.adobe.com/support/feature.html and file feature requests. You may not get a reply, but I can assure you they DO listen. New features of a software product when being designed are usually sketched, discussed, ripped apart, discussed some more, sold to non-believers (within the company), evangelised, villified, discussed even more….then maybe included in a product if there is enough justification.

Guess what? – You are the justification. Filing feature requests will allow software designers to “sell” the idea within a company. Features that have the backing of users almost always get more attention than some “nifty” idea that has never been done before.

Therefore, be quick, concise, objective and provide an absolute reason why you NEED it. Software 101 is: there are “Need” to have features, and “Nice” to have features. More often than not, it is you the user who decides which category a specific feature falls under.

This is how almost all software is made. I have personally gotten about two dozen features added to AE by following this method.

The power is really in your hands, it all depends on how you communicate what you feel is important.

Just my $0.02

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Steve Forde]

A minor bit of pendantia…

One of the founders of COSA and the primary developer behind AE informed me that it was indeed in V. 3.1 that they added support for multi-processors! However, many of the effects and functions in AE cannot be run in a “multi-thread” fashion, so Nucleo optimizes all of AE to run as multi-processes. This is how we generally get the performance gain across the board. Both AE 6.5 and 7.

In terms of RAM – AE 6.5 and 7 can address 4GB of RAM in Windows XP 64bit edition only. Installing that particular OS though may not be for the faint at heart..;)

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Steve Forde]

Overall, Nucleo will NOT make OpenGL faster, as we do not parallelize OpenGL (GPU), only CPU. That said, Nucleo will work in the following manner with OpenGL and AE 7.

1. If you have OpenGL Interactive Selected (my preferred option)

You will get the best of both worlds. The interactivity the GPU can provide when working on say 3D layers within a single frame is awsome. Fast manipulation of elements, movement etc. When you want to preview, use a Nucleo preview (RAM, or Shift RAM), and you will see the performance gain that Nucleo provides.

2. If you have OpenGL Always ON Selected

You will not see any performance benefit with Nucleo. This is because only the Graphics card is responsible for providing frames to AE 7 for RAM and Shift RAM previews. If you do use Nucleo with this method of OpenGL selected, it will render frames on CPU in the background, while AE renders frames in the foreground through the GPU. If you do not change anything in the timeline, and change OpenGL to Interactive, after doing a full Nucleo Preview with OpenGL Always ON – you will notice that Nucleo filled in the Green RAM line in the background.

In essence, you get 2 renders for the price of 1! This may only be relevant if OpenGL is providing a different quality of frame than a CPU render.

Let me know if this answers the question, as I am going to be posting a tip and trick about this on our website. It can get kind of complex, so would be great to see if this makes sense…;)

Thanks

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Steve Forde]

I put up a guide to AE and RAM, and this still applies to AE 7. The only difference is that AE 7 is now a Mach-O application (native OS X – not classic based), and can see up to 3GB of RAM on a Mac. Otherwise, the rest is the same.

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=2&postid=867951

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.
“Nucleo’s even better in AE 7!”

[Steve Forde]

(Start Sales Pitch)
Nucleo will fly on Particular. Our benchmarks show you should get a render done in about 40% less time when particular is used with Nucleo. Pretty similar results for Shine and Starglow.

You can download and try it for nothing – it will just watermark things.
(End Sales Pitch)

Hope all went well with the deadline.

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Steve Forde]

which specific plugs are you using from Trapcode? – I can give you a pretty close estimate…

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Steve Forde]

Thanks – always happy to help.

In terms of adding to the database – could you point me toward a “howto” for that? Or is that something the site moderators do?

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Steve Forde]

I can’t provide you with an “objective” opinion (I work at GridIron), but thought I would point out this because of your use of Trapcode…

https://www.gridironxfactor.com/products/nucleo_benchmarks_tc_3ds.asp

There are benchmarks for every trapcode plugin on our site. The only one where Nucleo won’t do so well in terms of performance gain is Trapcode “Lux” (its already multi-threaded).

Steve
GridIron Software

[Steve Forde]

OOPs – good catch. Wrote the whole thing here – and didn’t catch that one. Yes AE is NOT limited by the CFM problem in windows…

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Steve Forde]

I’ll try and remain completely out of any platform vs. platform discussions, as you have noted in our benchmarks, each platform can vary completely on what effects are used, types of projects etc. Alot of time, it is also dependent on what platform a specific effect was originally written on, and then “ported” to the other.

That said, one of the reasons why the Quad G5 routinely outperformed the Opteron in our benchmarks is simply because of a different RAM architecture and a newer (faster) memory bus. The Quad G5 uses DDR2 RAM, whereas our specific Opteron used DDR. This is important as the DDR2 architecture has double the data rate of the DDR RAM, and therefore provides better RAM throughput.

A good example of this is to look at the difference between the Pentium D Dual Core, and The Dual Pentium 4 Xeon with HT systems. Looking at the blue benchmark line (AE only), you can see that in many cases the Dual-Core (with just 2 physical CPU’s) outperformed the Xeon (with 2 physical and 2 logical CPU’s), due to the Pentium D using DDR2 over the DDR of the Xeon.

I’m going to post a new thread called “AE & RAM – the definitive guide” to answer your RAM questions, as I see it as a recurring theme on the COW. Will try to be as complete as possible in that new thread.

Lastly, agree the benchmarks are to be read with a grain of salt (lies, damn lies and statistics!). Many times the marketing folks will distort these type of things to push a product (just look at Apple’s Quad G5 product page!). Obviously, we are pushing a product too, but really tried to create a comprehensive suite (and are still adding more) that gives an “objective” viewpoint. Its one of the reasons why there are so many of them. We wanted to show that “Every project is different”, and that Nucleo will speed up many things, but will not speedup others. (notice a couple of benchmarks posted that show a minor slowdown with Nucleo on certain workstation types)

Hope this helps…

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.