How to make AE CC 2017 FULLY CPU loaded?

[Aaron Ecthelion]

Recently I've been doing some daily practice with AE CC 2017. When I rendered my piece, I found AE is NOT FULLY CPU loaded. And seemed like it used ONLY ONE of my 6 CPU cores. The CPU usage was always around 10%, which is so frustrating! And the RAM usage was around 30% - 40%.

So, how can I make my CPU fully loaded when rendering in AE?

By the way, here is some of my PC info:

CPU: Intel i7 6800K 6 cores

GPU: Geforce GTX 1070 8G

RAM: 32GB

OS: Win10 1607

[Mylenium]

So, how can I make my CPU fully loaded when rendering in AE?

You can't. That's just how it is. Many things are not multithreaded in AE, certain effects require linear processing and of course things like writing to a clip-based format will do the same, too.

Mylenium

[Aaron Ecthelion]

But the 10% CPU usage is too low. It takes me 40 mins to render out a piece which is not very complicated. But if I can't make it fully loaded, can I increase  the usage to 60% or 80%? 10% is almost UNUSABLE!

[Mylenium]

You can't enforce anything with AE. Beyond that any optimizations would require to know exact details about the project, which you haven't offered. Otherwise simply get used to it and plan for these contingencies. There is no point in fighting the program and expecting it to do things it isn't designed for.

Mylenium

[Aaron Ecthelion]

Thanks, Mylenium. Hope that one day we can render in After Effects in multithreaded way!

[Martin_Ritter]

I've written a render manager which can load up the computer to 100% by using parallelization - but it's still in beta.

Keep your eyes open, I'll announce it once it's final.

Cheers,

Martin

[Aaron Ecthelion]

Wow, can't wait!

[dbDavideBoscolo]

Wow! How can I get notified about this?

[Joolsd]

Does BG render work on a PC? Correct me if I'm wrong but it uses cores on one machine a lot better if the filters permit than with the default renderer or AME?

[dbDavideBoscolo]

If you're talking about the plugin it doesn't work for me. Render time is exactly the same. I did a test on a 1hour render. I have a i7 6800k 6core cpu.

[Joolsd]

OK fine so this is just a test. How many instances of BG did you use?

[Aaron Ecthelion]

In my case, BG Renderer doesn't speed up  a render very much on CC 2017. The rendering time is almost the same as using AE to render.

[Joolsd]

Try using image sequences. If you just set one instance off it will be the same. But if you click skip frames on and set off about 12 BG windows. I have found it a lot more effective. Also, why not get other machines rendering with BG. This idea of sticking to one machine can be a bit counter productive. I guess if you are at home or on your own this is often the case.

[Szalam]

If the core on which AE was running wasn't going very high, the bottleneck might be somewhere else.

While AE isn't going to run on all of the cores, I would hope it would at least go up on the one core it is using!

One thing you could try is to save a copy of your project back to version 13 and open it in CC 2014. Try rendering it with multiprocessing turned on. See if that helps.

What are your memory settings in CC 2017?

Also, can you describe the nature of your composition?

[Aaron Ecthelion]

I've tried the CC 2014 method, the multi-processing really helps! Now I can render my project at my machine's full speed.

Now everytime I have heavy project to render, I'll save as a 13.0 copy and render it in CC 2014. All I want is multi-processing back in the new release of After Effects, because I don't want to repeat this thing everytime I need to render.

As for my memory settings in CC 2017, I've reserved only 3GB RAM for other application(32GB installed in total).

The nature of my composition is quite simple. One layer with Trapcode Particular which is emitting many many particles. A camera layer and a simple gradient BG layer. That's it.

Thanks.

[Szalam]

Aaron Ecthelion wrote:

As for my memory settings in CC 2017, I've reserved only 3GB RAM for other application(32GB installed in total).

You should probably tweak those settings. It's generally recommended to leave a quarter of your RAM for other apps. So you should reserve 8 GB for other applications.

Glad to hear multiprocessing is helping. From your description of your project, that sounds right!

If you want to see a more multithreaded renderer in a new version of AE (without the bugs of the old one), please, please, PLEASE file a feature request. The more they get, the higher priority it gets. I've got some monster machines (that I got because I do a lot of C4D work) and they're just wasted when I work in AE, so I'm in the same boat as you.

[Aaron Ecthelion]

I've filled out the feature request about multi-processing.

And I also do a lot of C4D, so I can understand your situation where C4D can fully utilize your CPU but AE is just using one or two cores. It's very upset.

As for the memory setting, I reserve only 3GB RAM for other apps because when AE is rendering, typically I don't do heavy work on my computer. I just get my Chrome Browser on, and play some music, doing this kind of stuff.  In this case, reserving 8GB for other apps seems kind of waste.

I want AE to use my RAM as much as possible, as long as it's good to him.

So I leave 3GB for other apps

Cheers,

Aaron

[Szalam · Accepted solution]

The reason the recommendation is to leave more RAM is that some of the stuff AE does is considered system processes. The camera tracker, warp stabilizer, and several other tools (as well as some third-party plugins) use system resources other than what AE reserves for itself. I have seen issues where too little RAM was left and someone tried to stabilize a shot and it would crash or take forever.

You've got enough RAM that having all that RAM dedicated to AE won't speed up a render anyway. In fact, it is has the potential to make it worse instead of better.

[Aaron Ecthelion]

Thanks, I'll leave more RAM now. This info is helpful.

[Martin_Ritter]

Hello guys!

I've tried to set up something like an easy mailing list, but it doesn't seem to work. I'm very busy right now, so the easiest way to get informed about the rendermanger-project is to write a mail to dev@vogelmoritz.de. I won't spam you, just need your mail-addresses so I can send out a notification as soon as early states are passed.

I'll try my best to make this happen as soon as possible, but I can only code in my freetime, which is very less right now. Meh.

If things took too long, I'll release a very basic early version, which should already speed up rendering, but will missing a lot of planed features.

Cheers,

Martin

[Aaron Ecthelion]

I've already sent a mail to you.

Thanks

Aaron

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Aaron Ecthelion,

Care to mark any of these answers as correct? That is, if the answer helped you solve or understand the issue. Let us know.

Thanks,
Kevin