Preview rendering is very slow

[iLucastos]

Hi, I have a computer with 2 Intel Xeon Processors, 128GB RAM, NVIDIA P5000 with 16GB, system Windows 10 Pro on SATA SSD and working files on PCI SSD. With all that, when I'm trying to preview simple 2D animation with one simple movement, the rendering to RAM is going 2 frames per second. Any ideas where is the problem. Thank you.

[Mylenium]

Any ideas where is the problem.

Sure, easy enough:

Hi, I have a computer with 2 Intel Xeon Processors

You simply have the wrong computer for AE work, given that it is barely parallelized or multithreaded and that video processing generally suffers from the fact that a lot of operations require linear file access and equally linear temporal processing. Please search the forum. I have explained this a million times as have others.

Mylenium

[Dave_LaRonde]

Hit the zero key on the numeric keypad.  Wait a bit.  See what happens.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi LucasFTWFilms,

Sorry for this issue. Did you ever find a solution? Please let us know if you have or if you still need help.

Thanks,

Kevin

[iLucastos]

Hi there Kevin.

I didn't find a solution but I did find a problem and that's After Effects. The problem is that this program is not using full power of computer, it runs on the lowest speed possible. Could you please tell someone in Adobe to put a bit more effort with the new updated. It is a nightmare when the program is barely working.

Thank you and have a good weekend.

Lucas.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Lucas,

Give the team feedback here.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Snakedogman]

The correct answer to your question is to ask you to post a link to your project, or at least a screenshot, so people can judge wether caching 2 frames per second is actually slow or not. Because it might be, or it might not, depending on what is is you're previewing.

And no there isn't anything wrong with using a dual Xeon PC for After Effects. Even though AE doesn't really use all that power efficiently (yet), it is still getting more multithreaded with every release and AFAIK Adobe are still working on replacing the old multi cpu rendering. Even now, using the Background Render Pro script I can get AE to fully max out all the cores on my dual Xeon system, rendering significantly faster than I could on any single cpu system.

Not to mention that someone running AE might also be running Premiere or even Cinema 4D, both of which take much better advantage of many cores and multiple CPU's.

But even so, it is true that previewing will probably not make full use of a dual CPU system's power, so a single cpu system with a higher clock speed might be faster. Of course you can significantly speed up the preview by lowering the resolution to half or even quarter. Or (my favourite) to use the skip frame option. Just using a skip frame of 1 will make your preview caching TWICE AS FAST! And the preview will usually be more than clear enough to judge your animation. For previewing global timings across a long animation I might even use skip frame settings of 4 or 5.