AE only using 25 percent of my CPU

[Oceanking]

I would like to get faster renders.  I have noticed that after effects is only using 25 percent of my cpu.  Is there any way to crank that all the way up to 100 percent like Premier does automatically?

[Todd_Kopriva]

There are a lot of ways to get faster rendering. See the "Improve performance" section of After Effects Help.

Note that you won't always see your CPU being maxed out. Maybe the bottleneck in processing is your hard disk, your RAM, et cetera. The rendering of some compositions is memory-intensive, such as when you are working with very large background plates that are several thousands of pixels tall and wide. The rendering of some compositions is bandwidth-intensive (I/O-intensive), such as when you are working with many source files, especially if they are not served by a fast, local, dedicated disk drive. The rendering of some compositions is processor-intensive .

[Oceanking]

Thanks I'll look into that.

[Guest]

Also, if you enable Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously, the main After Effects application is just one instance. The other instances (depending on your number of cores) are called "AEselfLink". You may want to check CPU usage for those as well. But as Todd said, in many cases other factors become bottlenecks. And some features disable simultaneous frame rendering for that Comp.

[Benjamin_Hoch]

What I dont understand is why After Effect only uses 8% of my RAM. I have set a video to render and it used to say it was using like 65% of my RAM and when I went from CS3 to CS5 is suddenly is only using 8%. In the preferences I have set it to use the max 6.5GB. It seems rediculous that a 10 sec clip that took me an hour to render in CS3 takes 4 hours in CS5. Any help?

[Todd_Kopriva]

After Effects CS5 deals with RAM entirely differently than did After Effects CS3.

See this page for information about memory and performance:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/543440

Be sure to watch the videos and read the pages pointed to.

[CARLOSA345]

You fail to mention that AE multiprocessing is broken and buggy as hell. I have a 20-core 3.0ghz machine 64gb of ram. Weve tried many diiferent settings for multiprocessing and have not found a stable solution. Even if one setting works and doesnt crash your machine it will not work a second time. In my 3d software of use Cinema 4d when i render all cores go to work no problem why is this not so in AE??????????? Instead by default AE will use 4% of cpu and spike my ram all the way up. It is such an inefficient way of working. You guys have some serious reworking to do AE is slow compared to many other apps when it comes to rendering. If you add anything to the next version it should be faster rendering i mean changing UI colors is a joke seriously? Make the software redner faster. Resolutions are getting larger and AE rendering is outdated.

[Szalam]

CARLOSA345 wrote:

Resolutions are getting larger and AE rendering is outdated.

First of all, you're replying to a thread that's over three years old. A lot has changed in AE between then and now.

That being said, the AE team is aware of the issues you're experiencing. As the Adobe team has been saying for a while, the majority of the team is working on redoing the way AE does things to improve performance across the board.

Now, as to your current issues, I'd suggest starting a new thread and letting folks on here help you troubleshoot. I am not experiencing any of the woes you describe, so something is different in your system vs. mine. And, if the issues you describe were widespread, I'm pretty sure you'd be hearing more about it rather than having to wake a three-year-old thread. That seems to indicate to me that your problem is solvable.

As Todd mentioned in this thread, different comps will have different requirements as far as RAM, I/O, CPU, etc. and they can all be very different. AE works very differently from C4D because it's doing an entirely different job, so some differences should be expected.

However, I understand your frustrations. It can be annoying to try to fine-tune things on the technical end of things when you just want to be creative. I can only say that you should look forward to the future as the AE team continues their work and we will soon have a whole new experience of working in After Effects.

[CARLOSA345]

First of all do you work for Adobe? I dont think so much trouble shooting

should be required for a software that has been in production for as many

years as AE. All 3d applications which are doing more intense calculations

than AE dont require fine tuning to work properly. Second of all i work in

the industry as a 3d artist and motion graphics animator. Every single

person ive ever encountered through my career has had the same issues and

ive heard about multiprocessing being buggy and crashing your software

since it was implemented. Also you tell me that the team is working on the

problem so what good would it do to start a thread on it you can find

threads on this subject by the bunches and its never really resolved. Im

only writing on here in hope that somebody at adobe realizes that this is

an issue that needs fixing before anything else. AE is not using your

computers full power and maxing out the ram even without multiprocessing it

uses 4 to 25 percent of your cpu and maxes out ram. This my friend is a

well known problem in the industry i dont know what you do but i use AE for

a living and have encountered this issue over many years.

[Szalam]

CARLOSA345 wrote:

First of all do you  work for Adobe?

I do not work for Adobe. I'm a user like you. People on forums helped me out a lot when I was first learning AE over a decade ago and I like giving back to the communities that helped me so much.

CARLOSA345 wrote:

All 3d applications which are doing more intense calculations than AE dont require fine tuning to work properly.

This is a very valid frustration. It certainly seems as if it should behave differently.

However, your statement also demonstrates the core of the reason for the RAM/CPU behavior you've described. 3d software is doing more intense calculations. That's why it maxes the processors out, but look at the RAM use. For many of the 3d renders I do, the RAM isn't even halfway used yet all the cores are cranking away on my computer (plus all the cores on all the other computers I've wrangled into the render farm). After Effects is doing a lot of things that 3d software doesn't do, and so it uses system resources differently. It needs more RAM (for some compositions) and thus you're waiting on RAM while the processors seem to sit idle.

I've seen some folks with very footage-heavy compositions where their RAM and processors are sitting pretty idle because the bottleneck is their hard drive. If you're pulling 45 1080P clips at once for a shot, it's gonna take a bit for a normal hard drive to serve that up (luckily for me at my full-time job, I don't use normal hard drives).

But this is the crux of the problem. AE is such a versatile toolbox. It does things like DOF, 3d lights, soft shadows, particles, etc. but it also does keying, rotoscoping, stabilization and many other tasks. Some may rely on system resources other than the processors. That's why Adobe has made AE as tweakable as it is - they serve such a wide variety of uses.

Although, speaking of tweaking, have you seen how much tweaking you can do on C4D? It has a LOT more things in it to tweak than AE does. It doesn't usually crash though, but then, neither does my AE (which is why I suggested we could help figure out your issues).

And speaking of things sitting there idle, I would love for C4D to implement some form of GPU rendering natively as an option. I have very powerful GPUs in my computers at work (because my boss didn't listen to my technical request) and so it just sits there while C4D pounds on the processors. We haven't had time to do research into all the various GPU rendering plugins for C4D in order to make a choice and it frustrates the heck out of me to have all that horsepower just sitting there, idle.

CARLOSA345 wrote:

Also you tell me that the team is working on the problem so what good would it do to start a thread on it you can find threads on this subject by the bunches and its never really resolved.

The reason I suggested starting a thread was that I hoped the folks here in the forum could help you get your systems running without crashing on you. While I may have over a decade of experience, if you put the experience of the other folks on the forum together we have many centuries of experience. The veterans on these forums don't have the crashing issues you seem to be describing. Thus, I thought we might be able to help resolve your problems and remove the frustration you're experiencing.

Other threads from other people are running different systems than you are. Different OS, different hardware, different third-party plugins... If the majority of AE users had the crashing problems you're describing, AE wouldn't be the powerhouse in the industry that it is. That is what sparked my hope that there may be something fixable for you. RAM filling up while the processors sit at 25% might not be fixable by troubleshooting, but crashing probably can be.

And yes, the AE team says they're working on making it better, but it takes a while to rewrite software that is as complicated as AE is. This is not the kind of change that comes in a month or two. So, in the meantime, I thought we could help you work within the parameters of your current toolset until it improves.

I'm sure you've already been through these resources, but if you don't want to get help from the folks on the forums, it wouldn't hurt to take another look:

• Optimizing for performance: Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects
• Video2Brain - Optimizing CPUs
• FAQ: What are optimum memory settings for best performance in After Effects?
• A recorded event where the Premiere and AE team discussed how their programs use system resources: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=set_registered&id=2490687&loc=en_us
  
  

Like I said, I'm just a user like you and I'm only on these forums to try to help everyone else learn enjoy using AE as much as I do. Hopefully some of this helps you too.

[Mylenium]

Oceanking wrote:

Is there any way to crank that all the way up to 100 percent like Premier does automatically?

Nope. In addition to what was said before, you have to consider that many effects simply aren't that computationally intense. Even applying particle systems with several thousand particles is a walk in the park on modern computers. Furthermore, there is a difference whether an effect requires a lot of temporal information and thus needs to calculate several frames at once or if it's a "dumb" effect that just modifies color values or gnerates elements. It's really more a matter of how they are combined. Also note, that several functions and effects only use conventional multithreading, meaning that by themselves they will use 2 cores at most.

Mylenium

[spoof]

HI

I have just upgraded to an i7 intel from a q6600 quad core pc.

Im seeing only 16% cpu usage and my renders are taking the same amount of time on the new pc as the old.

So am I right in thinking that there was no point in upgrading my pc if AE cant use any more of the processor?

I find this hard to believe, especially considering my RAM and hard drives are faster. My ram is now DDR3 compared to DDR1 and my hard drives are being accessed at less than 1mb/sec. So I dont see any bottlenecks there!

[Todd_Kopriva]

You've told us very little about your setup, such as how much RAM you have, whether you're using Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing, what operating system you're using, etc.

Please read this page ("Memory & Multiprocessing preferences") and this page ("Performance tip: Don't starve your software of RAM") to learn about how memory settings can affect performance.

You also might want to read this page, including the comments:

"Improve performance"

[spoof]

thanks todd

having to manually set up the memory settings reminds me of using a mac about 10 years ago

Cant AE ballance RAM/CPU allocation automatically by looking at system resouces?

[Guest]

having to manually set up the memory settings reminds me of using a mac about 10 years ago

Cant AE ballance RAM/CPU allocation automatically by looking at system resouces?

That's what it does when you turn multiprocessing on and leave everything at default setttings.

However, some users may not want AE to squeeze every bit of CPU power/memory out of their systems for rendering, and choose instead to leave some resources free to do other work. That has nothing to do with the legacy Mac OS memory assignment.

Also, some users may have an amount of RAM that's barely adequate to use all their cores, but more than enough if they only use some of the available cores. In other words, there are some exceptions.  That said, there's only so much you can do with 32 bit memory addressing when it comes to taking advantage of RAM. That's why the move to 64 bit in the next release is so important.

have just upgraded to an i7 intel from a q6600 quad core pc.

Spoof: A move from a q6600 quad core to an i7 quad core processor may be a bit mild as an upgrade. I don't know why you expected something drastic, honestly. Even in a best case scenario (not even talking about AE), you could expect a 20-30 per cent increase in real world performance. But in most cases (say, if you had 8 GB of RAM), the virtual cores may just suck more RAM without increasing performance. AE's multiprocessing strategy benefits from actual/physical cores, more than virtual/logical cores.

FYI render multiple frames doesnt do squat,

Well, AE help documents a number of features which disable multiprocessing completely. But other than that, a lot of independent benchmarks have showed a drastic speed-up factor when enabling "Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously" in a multi-core machine with adequate RAM (2 GB or more per physcial core/cpu). In fact, web sites like barefeats.com use After Effects CS4 as the ultimate benchark to measure the performance of the multiprocessing power in new systems.

[345712473471]

THe only way ive managed to make use my quadcore with AE is to use gridiron's nucleo pro 2.

FYI render multiple frames doesnt do squat, adobe doesnt have any clue what its doing when it comes to performance, all they can do is add bells and whistles and try to keep it all in one piece.

[faithfultennyson5C21]

this is realy frustrating am usung after effects v22.0.1.2 and my processeor doesnt go more that 50% and 20 most of the time my ram is 77% pls what can i do to fix this its not fair am tired an i have just 12 hours to finish this project 
PC spec

Intel Core i7-4770 3.4ghz up to 3.9ghz boost
24GB ram
windows 10 professional
SSD for Drive C

comp size 

5120x3000 25fps 32bpc

am using the GLOW effects together with hue saturation and tint 

and screen, overlay  blending in different layers 

[ColetonGGG]

Did you ever figure out what was the issue ? Cause I have a RTX 3080 , 32 GB of RAM and a I9 9900k and im still struggling in after effects. 

[joshua5EF1]

Has anyone found a fix to this or are you just going to keep glorifying adobes garbage product that they dont help you with whatsoever no reason it should take 10 hours to render something that is 10 seconds long several other software have a high render with 100x more things in the scenes you get this effect WITHOUT even using 3D stuff... What kind of ripoff is this where yall cant fix your product and charge this much for a product that wont even finish the rendering process without failing on small projects. FIX IT