Thank you EVERYONE for the constructive replies! Really appreciate it!

1.BenMarkus,

 

Aug 7, 2012 4:49 PM   in reply to eatChocolat

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There could be a lot of reasons why the render times are slow.  How slow are we talking?  Third Patry Plug-ins often take a long time to render.  Also After Effects never plays at the original fps without using the RAM Preview button.  Basically we need to know a lot more to help you.

Well that is good to know! I didn't know about the RAM preview until you mentioned it!

I've just tried it and for a 60fps clip (no effects added to it), it plays it at around 30fps compared to 25fps with regular play/pause.

I'm using:

• AE CS5 v10.0.0.458
• OSX mountain lion 10.8
• 2.3Ghz Intel i7-3615QM (4 cores)
• 256Gb SSD Hard Drive
• 8GB 1600Mhz DDR3
• NVIDIA GT 650M 1024Mb

Szalam wrote:

 

Just because you paid what seems to be a lot of money, does not mean you have a very powerful machine; it just means you spent money. As much as I love Apple products, I find them to be somewhat overpriced for the amount of power you get. Not to mention that a notebook computer, no matter the brand, is always far inferior to a desktop machine at the same price point.

I agree with you; desktops with always smash laptops. But the specs I have are pretty good for a laptop. This is what we're concentrating on here.

"Slow" is a relative term. Twixtor can be a pretty render-intensive effect. Is this slower with the same project on your MacBook Pro than it is on another machine or is this the first time you've tried it?

Well it's true that I didn't try with other effects so I might be panicking for nothing. I'm comparing the rendering times with my 3 year old laptop:

• AE CS5.5 v10.5.0.253
• Windows 7 64bit
• 2.1Ghz Intel Pentium (dual core)
• 4GB
• 300GB 5400rpm
• GPU: Mobile Intel 4 Chipset

You can see that the RAM is double, the processor is much more powerfull and having a SSD HDD over a regualr 5400rpm one, is a massive upgrade!

Also, you didn't list your processor speed, but you don't really have a very powerful machine. I mean, it's probably pretty good for a notebook (although, a lot of processing power may go into running that cool display.) And I say "probably pretty good for a notebook" because you haven't even said how many cores your processor even has. The max you could have in the i7 is 4, but you might only have 2. I don't know the specs on the new MBP, but a professional motion graphics workstation is likely to have 8, 12, or more. What you get in any notebook can never compare to a proper desktop workstation.

Well I'm confident enough to say that an i7 is one of the best processors you can get in a laptop atm. This one - 2.3Ghz Intel i7-3615QM - has 4 cores (and they each run 2 threads at a time). And the display doesn't hit the CPU that bad. The ram and GPU do work a little harder tho.

And I'm not here to compare desktops with laptops. My workstation has to be on a laptop. I work on yatchs and a desktop is irrelevant for me right now. So I'm looking at how to make rendering more efficient regardless of how slow other tasks (outside AE) might be.

Yes; there may be settings you can tweak to make AE render quicker. Turn off multiprocessing and see if it's faster or slower. Then try tweaking some of the other settings in the memory and multiprocessing and testing. There are many factors that influence rendering speed and there is no "correct" setting in there.

I will try all of the options mentioned above, hope that makes a difference or at least makes me understand how the software interacts with the hardware.

4.lasvideo,

 

Aug 9, 2012 8:27 AM   in reply to eatChocolat

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Twixtor is known to be a slower renderer due to the complex computations it does when creating frames.

Well like I said above, I do realise now I haven't actually tried any other effects. Good to know Twixtor might be the main reason and not the hardware it self!

I'm just really supprised AE cant playback a clip at its orignal frame speed even tho the clip hasn't been modified.

OK on the rMBP it took 10mins to render a 1minute clip with a twixtor effect lasting 55secs. It took 20mins on the old Asus laptop.

The difference is massive but is it still a good render speed?