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After Effects CS6 running painfully slow

Community Beginner ,
Aug 21, 2012 Aug 21, 2012

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I am working on a composition in Adobe After Effects CS6, and it's running painfully slow. I've tried to mess with some of the settings in the preferences, and lowering the quality of the preview. But I still feel like I'm running terribly slow considering the speed of my computer. Here's what I'm running:

Mac Pro Desktop

  Model Name:          Mac Pro

  Model Identifier:          MacPro5,1

  Processor Name:          Quad-Core Intel Xeon

  Processor Speed:          2.4 GHz

  Number Of Processors:          2

  Total Number Of Cores:          8

  L2 Cache (per core):          256 KB

  L3 Cache (per processor):          12 MB

  Memory:          24 GB

  Processor Interconnect Speed:          5.86 GT/s

Video Card

NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800:

  Chipset Model:          NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800

  Type:          GPU

  Bus:          PCIe

  Slot:          Slot-1

  PCIe Lane Width:          x16

  VRAM (Total):          1536 MB

  Vendor:          NVIDIA (0x10de)

  Device ID:          0x05fe

  Revision ID:          0x00a1

  ROM Revision:          3426

  Displays:

SyncMaster:

  Resolution:          1680 x 1050 @ 60 Hz

  Pixel Depth:          32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)

  Display Serial Number:          H9LPA06272 

  Main Display:          Yes

  Mirror:          Off

  Online:          Yes

  Rotation:          Supported

SyncMaster:

  Resolution:          1680 x 1050 @ 60 Hz

  Pixel Depth:          32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)

  Display Serial Number:          H9LPA06265 

  Mirror:          Off

  Online:          Yes

  Rotation:          Supported

Hard Drive

WDC WD1001FALS-41Y6A0:

  Capacity:          1 TB (1,000,204,886,016 bytes)

  Model:          WDC WD1001FALS-41Y6A0                  

  Revision:          05.03D06

  Serial Number:               WD-WCATR2482149

  Native Command Queuing:          Yes

  Queue Depth:          32

  Removable Media:          No

  Detachable Drive:          No

  BSD Name:          disk0

  Rotational Rate:          7200

  Medium Type:          Rotational

  Bay Name:          Bay 1

  Partition Map Type:          GPT (GUID Partition Table)

  S.M.A.R.T. status:          Verified

  Volumes:

  Capacity:          209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)

  Writable:          Yes

  BSD Name:          disk0s1

MAC OS X:

  Capacity:          677.53 GB (677,531,090,944 bytes)

  Available:          421.16 GB (421,160,968,192 bytes)

  Writable:          Yes

  File System:          Journaled HFS+

  BSD Name:          disk0s2

  Mount Point:          /

Untitled:

  Capacity:          322.33 GB (322,328,068,096 bytes)

  Available:          183.98 GB (183,976,169,472 bytes)

  Writable:          No

  File System:          NTFS

  BSD Name:          disk0s3

  Mount Point:          /Volumes/Untitled

The composition I'm working with does have 1 camera, and about 45 small 3D comps built into it. No lights. And all of the footage and data is on the Mac OSX hard drive. Which has tons of space available as you can see. I've played around with the settings in After Effects. But nothing seems to significantly speed things up. Any ideas??

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LEGEND ,
Aug 21, 2012 Aug 21, 2012

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If you're using AE's new raytracing feature, you need to be aware that it makes rendering painfully slow.  No, excruciatingly slow.

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LEGEND ,
Aug 21, 2012 Aug 21, 2012

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Umm

about 45 small 3D comps built into it.

3D comps are just slow even without raytracing. Collapsing transformations does just that. Simply get over it and accept things as they are. Despite Adobe telling people otherwise for years, AE simply sucks at anything 3D no matter what...

Mylenium

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Community Expert ,
Aug 22, 2012 Aug 22, 2012

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Workflow is especially critical if you are dealing with 3-D comps in HD. Make sure that your assets are all properly sized. Make sure your assets are in codecs that are easily deciphered by the CPU. And MPEG codecs are definitely not easy for the machine figure out and may slow things down considerably. If you use expressions to tie things together make sure you haven't written a loop where one thing refers to another thing which refers to another thing. These can slow things way down.

The only potential bottleneck in your system is that you are using your system drive to read and write your production files. Things will go faster if you put in a second hard drive. Better yet by three drives and srtipe them together in a level 0 RAID.

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Explorer ,
Feb 26, 2014 Feb 26, 2014

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Rick Gerard wrote:

If you use expressions to tie things together make sure you haven't written a loop where one thing refers to another thing which refers to another thing. These can slow things way down.

I use a lot of index+1 or -1 on my comps, is this the kind of loop you're referring to?

Thanks,

David.

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LEGEND ,
Feb 26, 2014 Feb 26, 2014

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He meant an expression that references something effected by an expression which references something else...etc. until one of the expressions references the result of the first one. If that happens, the computer is stuck trying to run calculations on the same loop of expressions.

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Explorer ,
Feb 26, 2014 Feb 26, 2014

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Thanks man, at first I thought he meant that too, but that will actually crash AE, not slow down your project, hence my question about index, I know it's not a loop but I believe that might be bogging down my system and just wanted to confirm with Rick.

Best,

David.

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Advocate ,
Feb 26, 2014 Feb 26, 2014

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LATEST

expressions using index+/-1 are not necessarily slower, but they will be if they imply a recursion. For instance

LEADER = thisComp.layer("LEADER);

(index===LEADER.index) ? value : thisComp.layer(index-1).property("blah blah").value-5;

will be +++slow, while

LEADER = thisComp.layer("LEADER);

leadIDX = LEADER.index;

LEADER.property("blah blah").value-5*(index-leadIDX);

will behave just normally. Same for valueAtTime.

Xavier.

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Contributor ,
Aug 23, 2012 Aug 23, 2012

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Hey PJ,

I've been using CS6 since it was released, and while it's got a bunch of great new features, it's basically made Multi Processing unusable unless we're talking about the simplest of comps.   I'm working on my second short using AE as the total animation package, and render times for complicated 3D comps (NOT using ray tracing) have tripled.   MP used to take forever to spool up, but was fast once it got rolling.  Now, disabling MP gives me 3 or 4 times faster rendering, which is still MUCH slower than MP is CS5.5.  SOmething has deflineitly changed for the worse, as i'm using the same machine with the same settings and virtually the same comps.

I acutally just yesterday had two animators quit on my because they couldn't meet their deadlines.

I think After Effects is the hydra of programs.  They kill one feature and two more fill its place.  Unfortuanly we traded functional Multi-processing for falloff lighting and etc...  The puppet tool was it 3 version of after effects before it was stable.  I'm hoping we don't have to wait til CS7 for MP to sort itself out.

I really don't understand the "deal with it" aspect of the posters here.  Surely a functional program that delivers on it's promises is the goal of this forum.  We're not asking it to make us a sandwich.

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Community Beginner ,
Aug 23, 2012 Aug 23, 2012

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Hey Mike, thanks for you input. I guess I sitll don't know what to do though. There are so many $#*^& settings in AE and trying to get the settings just right is like building a space ship (i.e. I need a bunch of engineers). Is there a way to turn off the ray tracing that you mentioned? I turned off MP and it doesnt' seem to help. On a side note, I'm only using one actual video file in this comp and it's a mov file using the Animation codec. Any other ideas? Maybe I should just downgrade to CS5?

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Contributor ,
Aug 23, 2012 Aug 23, 2012

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make sure that the "renderer" in the top right of your viewer says "classic 3D".  There are lots of render settings posts by Todd on here, but I haven't seen a CS6 specific one...

http://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2010/10/please-try-recommended-memory-settings-for-after-effects-...

this makes a big difference.

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