Cinema 4D Lite Plugin - Slow & Laggy

[Synectics]

Hi All

I'm trying to figure out why After Effect's Cinema 4D Lite plugin's performance is so bad. I'm using a Dell precision 7510 with a i7-6820HQ, 32GB of RAM and Quadro M2000M graphics. Quite modern, but the plugin is so laggy with OpenGL turned on that it's un-usable. The CPU/GPU doesn't register as being under any load at all so i'm unsure if this is a preferences setting that is messing everything up or if its something else. The lag is awful regardless if there are any 3D models on the screen or not.

If I turn OpenGL off, it gets better, but obviously this is less than ideal performance too.

I'm a complete newbie to this so any advice on troubleshooting/solving this would be greatly appreciated.

[Rick Gerard]

Speed depends on what you are doing in the composition, the comp settings, the Composition Panel settings. Generally you should set your Magnification (far right) to 50% or less and the Composition resolution to Auto. Your Composition Settings should be one of the standard presets. 4K takes 8 times as long to render as HD. Lights, 3D layers, cameras, particle systems, and temporal (time changes) effects dramatically increase render times. If the composition is set to use the Ray-traced (deprecated and not advisable) or the C4D rendering engine your render times will go up dramatically. If you have huge images that are scaled way down in your composition and never reach something close to 100% scale in your composition you are adding significant time to your renders.

Compositing apps like After Effects process pixels and they all work very slowly compared to a Non Linear Editor like Premiere Pro. In my daily work I sometimes create complex composites that take several minutes per frame to render at final quality. Seven minutes per frame is my design limit but most of my really complex composites render at about 1 or 2 minutes per frame at full resolution. My simple stuff can render at several frames per second. When you start throwing Cineware and 3D models into your composite things are going to slow down.

Here's one more hint for a newbie... Don't edit in AE. Most of your AE comps should be one shot and only include the frames that you are actually going to use in the final edit. More than 90% of my composites are under 7 seconds. About 80% of my motion graphics and animations are no longer than a single sentence of narration or a single phrase of music. The work is rendered to a visually lossless production format and then edited in Premiere Pro, the sound is mixed in Audition, and the final product is rendered using the Adobe Media Encoder. This sounds like more work than just editing a pice in After Effects, but it is far more efficient and takes less time than trying to create a 4 or 5 minute movie in AE.

I hope this helps.

If you are still having problems we need complete workflow details and a screenshot of the entire UI with the modified properties of the layers giving you problems revealed (press the U key twice and print screen and paste to the forum). Without details there is no way to know how to help.

[Synectics]

Hi Rick, thanks for the response

AE handles what i've put together in Cinema 4D pretty well, however the issue is with the Cinema 4D plugin which boots itself when I select to edit the model in AE.

I've recorded the window to try and illustrate this better. The first bit is me moving the view around with OpenGL on, after a while my cursor wiggles around in the top left, thats me turning it off (not sure why the menus were not captured), and it begins to move freely as a result.

2017-07-19 10-37-16 on Vimeo

(Perhaps this is something I should take to the Cinema 4D support team, wasn't so sure as the plugin is dependent on AE running)

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Synetica,

Sorry for this issue. Did you ever find a solution? Please let us know if our experts’ advice helped you or if you still need help.

Thanks,

Kevin