[Walter Soyka]

You would benefit from more RAM for multiprocessing — 2 GB per core at a minimum; 3 GB or 4 GB per core would be preferable.

You might try making your shock wave effect with the Displacement filter, using Radio Waves to generate the displacement map.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Jon,

What does Activity Monitor show during the render when you get to Big Pete? If your memory usage is suddenly skyrocketing and the system starts swapping out to hard disk, you might have a strange RAM problem after all.

I recently made this suggestion in a similar thread:

There’s a secret menu in the preferences where you can disable the layer cache and set AE to purge frames during make movie —- though this should be a 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” item where you can make these changes.

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.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

I had a similar render issue on a MBP recently. My project was just a series of simple scales and crops on a very large image sequence, and after about 30 frames or so of speedy rendering, it ground to a halt.

I disabled the layer cache and set AE to purge every 20 frames during make movie. There’s a secret menu in the preferences where you can adjust these—though this should be a 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” item where you can make these changes.

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.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

What format is your footage in?

You mentioned that the render starts quickly, then slows down. Is there a particular point in your render where you notice it slowing down dramatically?

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Bravo! Thanks for sharing this, Todd.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

A couple notes on my experience with distributed rendering in with After Effects, which may help you as you build out your render farm:

All the render nodes will need to have any plugins and fonts used in the project.

Different plugins carry different license restrictions for render nodes. Some allow only one install per license, some allow five or ten, and some are unlimited.

Multiple cores/processors count in the “maximum number of machines.” If you have four quad-core render nodes, you need a maximum of at least 16 (and probably more with hyperthreading).

I never recommend OpenGL rendering, but it’s especially important not to use it here; different graphics cards could render the same effect differently on neighboring frames.

AE’s network renderer is somewhat naive. Each node gets the same sequence, and looks to the shared storage to see what frames have been rendered already, and will take the first unrendered frame in the range. As you add render nodes, you greatly increase load on you network and on the shared disk subsystem. A fast network and a beefy file server are very important. Without that, it may be faster to manually split your render across your multiple workstations.

AE’s network render always works with image sequences. If any you need to make any tweaks, you only need to delete the image files representing the affected frame range and re-render. The network render will only re-render the missing frames.

You can use the “set proxy” post-render action to automate conversion from the image sequence to a movie file. In “Output Module” for the comp, set the post-render action to “Set proxy.” Add the comp to the render queue a second time and choose whatever output settings you require. Under “Render Settings” change “Proxy Use” to “Use All Proxies.” Once the multi-machine image sequence has been created, one of the nodes in your network will go through the image sequence and create your movie file. Again—a fast network and disk subsystem are a must.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Stewart,

This is going to be challenging without the budget to afford the professional hardware and software usually used for three-screen events–unless I have misunderstood your previous post.

What do you have in the way of video distribution and switching to handle all these sources?

Revisiting your TripleHead idea, you could play your three-screen sync video from a single laptop if you create a single movie with the three channels side-by-side. In 3072×768 mode, the TripleHead only pushes about 15% more pixels than full-raster 1920×1080 HD, so a high-spec computer, judicious video compression, and lots of testing could veriify smooth playback. It’s far from ideal, but it could work.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

It depends what sort of work you’re doing, but I’ve found that nearly all of my renders are CPU-bound, not disk-bound. That is, the computer can read and write the frames far faster than it can calculate them.

Do you have lots of RAM? If you don’t have at least 2GB per core in a multi-processing setup, your render could crawl while the computer swaps memory to disk and back. This is probably the largest factor for most folks in reducing render times.

Adding a dedicated render drive won’t hurt, though, and it’s certainly cheap enough.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

[Stewart Bourke] “I can see actually how this is going to be tricky to line up the videos, especially if I want them to float across screens in time… “

This adds another layer of complexity. Setting aside how you want to do this for a moment, can you describe what exactly you want to see on the screens and what kind of control you want to have live?

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Do you really need the HD1010? It looks like the HD210 might do what you need (HDMI & network synchronization) at a lower price. See their product comparison sheet for details.

I haven’t used these units yet, but others on this forum hold them in high regard.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production