Cineware performance in AE 6x slower than in Cinema4D... and it crashes while rendering

[BennyE]

Hi all,

I've seen a couple of older forum posts about Cineware performance, but none of them offer any solutions, unfortunately.  I have a fairly simple model in Cinema 4D with several parallel spots (set to not cast shadows) and some geometry, but no textures.  In Cinema 4D, the scene renders in less than a second, probably a half second or so.  In AE, each frame takes 5 to 6 seconds to render at full res (1080), with the whole comp projected to take about 20 min to render.  In AE, there are two Cinema 4D layers with one of them being used as a track matte.  The only other thing AE is doing is compositing the C4D scene with a QuickTime, but the render time is the same if I turn off the QT layer.

What's arguably a larger issue is that AE keeps crashing while rendering out the comp.  I looked at the Console and this message came up:

Exception Type:        EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)

Exception Codes:       KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000024

Exception Note:        EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

One time I did get an error about running out of memory, which would make sense.  While AE is rendering, its memory usage is slowly creeping up and up until nearly all 24GB of my Mac Pro are used up.  There aren't any textures in this project, so I'm not sure why it's eating up so much memory.  Nor do I understand why it isn't purging unused memory as it moves along in the render.

Any ideas?

thanks!

Ben

Mac Pro

8 core

24GB RAM

OS X 10.11.4

Radeon R9 280X 3GB

[Mylenium]

Nor do I understand why it isn't purging unused memory as it moves along in the render.

Why should it? AE never releases memory until the very last moment due to its "lazy caching" approach. Likewise, recent versions of Cinema 4D do some RAM caching for the output and retain multiple frames up to a certain point. The rest is unclear. I'm reading a lot of vague stuff without any actual screenshots and details. For all I know, this might have nothing to do with the C4D layers at all but could e.g. be an issue in the AE track matte usage.

Mylenium

[BennyE]

Hi Mylenium,

Why should AE purge RAM while it renders?  Because frame 240 doesn't rely on the outcome of frame 239, much less frame 1, in order to render.  It's an incredibly inefficient use of RAM.  I'm not saying AE is to blame—it could be Cineware that's the problem—but I've seen far more complex projects render in Maya on much less RAM. 

I cannot provide screenshots for IP reasons, but I'm happy to provide more details about the project if it would help to troubleshoot this. 

Basically, I've shot video of an instrument that has lasers running through it.  I'm using Cinema4D to create the lasers and AE composites the lasers with the video.  There are two C4D layers in AE.  One consists entirely of parallel spot lights serving as the lasers.  The track matte consists of geometry that represents that shape of the instrument that obscures the lasers at certain points in the image (i.e. if the laser goes through a tube, there is geometry for that tube). 

For others using Cineware, are you finding similar render times between C4D and AE?  Even if I drop the resolution of AE to a quarter, which is roughly the resolution that C4D Lite is rendering at, it still takes about 4x as long to render at C4D. 

thanks!

Ben

[Kevin-Monahan]

Are you still experiencing this performance issue, Ben? Please let us know. I want to make sure that this was addressed in the latest release.

Thanks,
Kevin

[BennyE]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for checking in.  I really appreciate it. 

I just picked up this project again and am now running AE 15.0.1 and Cineware 3.1.22.  Unfortunately, the performance issue remains.  In fact, the performance delta seems even worse:  in Cinema4D the scene will render in less than a second (it's really simple), and in AE it takes between 9–12 seconds.  I have even upgraded my machine since I last wrote.  I'm now running a clean install of High Sierra on a 2010 Mac Pro with 12 cores and 64GB RAM (previously it was a 2006 Mac Pro upgraded to 8 cores and 24GB RAM).  The graphics cards remains the same:  a Radeon R280X 3GB. 

Any idea why the render takes so long in AE?  The only layer I have visible is the Cineware layer, so AE isn't having to do any compositing, other than I am using multi-pass rendering in Cineware, but again, the geometry is super simple.  C4D is rendering with multi-pass in less than a second. 

thanks!

Ben

[BennyE]

Hi Kevin,

It's been nearly a year now and have not received a response from Adobe about this issue.  The project was back-burnered last year, and I am picking it up again now to finish it.  I am running AE 16.0.1 and the performance is still dismal—it takes 12 seconds to render in AE versus less than a second in C4D.  AE is over 1,200% slower than C4D.  What's perhaps even worse is when I make a change in C4D and switch over to review it in AE, it consistently takes 58 seconds for AE to process the changes then render the frame.  You can imagine that in a given day I'm making at least 100 changes that I need to review in AE, which equates to 100 minutes when I'm sitting waiting for AE. 

Seeing as the original post is over a year and a half old now, I am frustrated that Adobe has not given me a response to my question, much less resolved this issue.  I'm paying monthly for the Creative Cloud and expect much better customer support and resolution to performance issues than this. 

Ben