[Walter Soyka]

Erik, this is a great concise post on how to maximize AE performance by adjusting your workflow.

The only two things I’d have to add for the original poster are tips for working, not rendering. Check out Region of Interest rendering, and set up Shift-RAM preview to run at a low resolution and skip frames. I leave RAM preview at high quality settings for fine detail work, and then use Shift-RAM preview for fast and coarse evaluations.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Jean Piche] “When I launch my render, the machine works fast enough for about ten minutes and then stupendously grinds down to calculating a frame once in a while and giving me a render time of 26 hours for this 5 minute simple project.”

Can you trace the point where it slows down to any new layers or effects coming in?

[Jean Piche] “According to ACtivity Monitor, the machine seems to spend most of its time idling with the disk scratching away at what sounds like paging.”

What’s the RAM usage look like in Activity Monitor? If you are in fact running out of RAM (which could happen, due to the caching for the time-based effects), you might benefit from the Secret Menu — though I always treat this as the tool of last resort.

Hold down the Shift key, and keep it down. Click After Effects > Preferences > General. Continue to hold the Shift key, and click on the list of preferences. You should see a “Secret” menu item. In there, you can disable layer caching, and choose a frame increment at which AE will automatically purge memory. You might start with a value like 30 frames, and decrease it if you still see the render hanging.

If your renders were working perfectly, you would see a big performance hit for mucking with these settings; however, since they are not, it may help. Don’t forget to reset them for your next project.

[Dave LaRonde] “My suggestion: cut back to 8 cores/3.5 GB each, or even 6 cores, 4GB each.”

Thanks for the kind words, Dave — and this is a great suggestion. Multiprocessing only CS4 uses physical cores, though it can see the virtual cores. CS5 will apparently support hyperthreading (virtual cores).

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Andy Joseph] “Do you think X5650 having 670 Mhz lesser clock speed will make lot of difference in rendering & scrubbing previews.? “

Personally, I’d rather have the Xeon and the option of installing a second processor than the Core i7 with the higher clock speed. Either processor will be a huge improvement over your current Core 2 Duo.

[Andy Joseph] “HDD: Intel X-25 Xtreme SDD, 32GB”

I see that you’re looking for a speedy boot disk, but will 32 GB be enough for your system and apps? Maybe it will, but I’d recommend you take a quick inventory on your system now to make sure you’ll have enough space.

[Andy Joseph] “Do you recommend Quadro FX1800 or should i use this money to buy more 4 GB RAM & get some cheaper Geforece card ?”

Depends what else you need to do with this workstation. If it’s mainly AE, I’d go for the GTX 285 and more RAM, but perhaps you have other needs outside of AE that would benefit from a Quadro.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Buzz Pierce] “Recently did graphics for a trailer that will play before a “3D” movie. The client wants the graphics to be in “3D” when viewed in the theater with the 3D glasses on. The graphics were created in AE in 3D space. Anyone have any idea how I need to export these graphics for true 3D viewing? Is this something AE can do? “

What 3D projection system will you be using? You will need to talk to an expert there about the actual deliverables required.

I’ve done a couple stereo tests with AE, and I found it really cumbersome because the software itself lacks built-in stereo support. Nuke would be a better option, because stereo support is built-in, but since everything is already built in AE, you may as well finish there.

Check out Chris Keller’s awesome stereoscopic scripts for After Effects. I’ve used them a few times. The workflow is still a bit clunky because of AE’s limitations, but these scripts are an incredibly well thought-out workaround for this, and they will save you hours and hours of work.

You might find some more information on the Stereoscopic 3D forum here.

I’ll also point out a couple threads that helped me:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/268/10

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/268/84

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Philip Savvides] “unable to allocate space for a 5048×1320 image buffer”

This error is telling you that After Effects can’t grab enough free RAM to hold an image that’s 5048×1320 pixels.

Are any of your comps or images larger than they really need to be?

[Philip Savvides] “I have a 4 GB ram and quad core processor which is quite fast and i dont run any other applications while i am rendering… in the memory and multiprocessing i checked the multiprocessing check box and put it to faster rendering.”

4 GB of RAM is not really enough for multiprocessing. With a quad-core processor, you should have 12 to 16 GB before you enable multiprocessing. You want to aim for 2 to 4 GB per core, and leave a little overhead for the operating system. I’d turn multiprocessing off completely and see if that helps.

[Philip Savvides] “I wen to the secret menu and did disabled layer cache and made it purge every 10 frames”

It may not be necessary after you disable multiprocessing, but if this doesn’t work, you could turn it down even further. Purge every 1 or 2 frames and see if that helps. Your render will be slower (because AE won’t be able to cache things in RAM), but it should get all the way through.

[Philip Savvides] “STill nothing…. i even changed the render destination drive… “

Like I mentioned, this error is about RAM, so changing your render drive won’t help.

I’d suggest you render to an image sequence instead of a movie; that way, if your render fails for any reason, you can re-render the image sequence with the “Skip existing frames” option and pick up right where the render failed (instead of losing all your work).

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

I don’t think these updates are about making better editors; like you mentioned, these are tools, and talent doesn’t come included. I think these updates are about making good editors faster (which means more productive, and ultimately more profitable).

Who needs these features? Anyone who receives footage with mixed codecs, or P2, or traditional delivery codecs. Anyone cutting footage shot on a DSLR. Anyone who doesn’t really even know what a codec actually is.

It’s a waste of an editor’s (and an edit system’s) time and resources to transcode or rewrap footage before editing. Avid and Adobe are proving that this is an unnecessary speed bump in our workflows on today’s hardware.

So why does it matter what will come with the next version of Final Cut Suite? For me, it’s because I’m always looking to increase productivity. Knowing that Apple was planning on including some of the features Adobe and Avid have added to their products would keep me on Final Cut. Knowing that they were planning on sticking with their transcode-based workflow would make me seriously look into Premiere for all the same reasons Walter Biscardi mentioned.

We all make our livings with these tools, so I think it’s easy to understand why news like NAB this year and the FCS rumor kick off the discussions that they do.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Andy Joseph] “Finally CS5 is launched, did you find it good enough?”

CS5 has been announced, but it’s not shipping yet — it should ship within the next month.

I am planning to upgrade as soon as it ships, because I will really benefit from the improved memory handling. You should note that 32-bit plugins are not supported on AE CS5, and you will have to upgrade all your plugins. Different developers have different release schedules and upgrade pricing, so be sure to check in with the developers of any plugins that you rely on.

[Andy Joseph] “Also i have to ask you, holding on to my budget should i compromise on CPU or Graphic card such as Quadro. ? Which is more important for AE “

AE doesn’t benefit from an advanced graphics card, so for AE, I’d go for RAM and CPU.

Some plugins and many other apps (including Adobe Premiere) can take advantage of advanced graphics cards like the NVIDIA Quadro line, so you may consider it anyway if it will give you a big benefit outside of AE.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

Erik, you’re completely correct. I tried to add a little more specificity to your comments on the video. Hopefully we’ll clear this up.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

Some other posters have mentioned monitoring, and I agree that this is the primary issue for you to address. It’s not enough to play with the colors on your computer screen; you’ll need a video capture card, a quality grading monitor, and a set of hardware or software scopes in order to critically evaluate your work.

You should also be aware that your final deliverable will determine the color space you’ll be using, so understanding Adobe’s color management feature and workflows will be important. There are gamma shift issues to address with ProRes 422 on CS3 and ProRes 4444.

Even if you don’t use Apple Color on this project, I’d suggest that simply browsing the Apple Color forum here will be very educational.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Steve Roberts] “You might also want to post this in the live & stage events forum, since they know a lot about this sort of thing, in general. “

Steve, thanks for sending this our way, and for all your good advice above. Kate started a new thread on this topic in the Live & Stage Events forum, too, if anyone is interested.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events