HELP - AE ONLY USES 1 CORE for in-comp render

Hi Mylenium,

Thanks for the reply. No luck when turning off disk cache and gpu hardware acceleration was not on.

I'm still very stumped as to why AE refuses to use all cores (even just more than 1) when working in-comp, but will use all when rendering a final version... The disparity in speed is enourmous and I don't see how AE justifies the difference in hardware utilization.

Thanks!

James

Mylenium / anyone else,

#1: I've run a number of tests. I swapped my 20k jpgs for psd files after someone had mentioned it may be the decompressing of 20k worth of image. The render time was pretty much the same.

#2: I found the real culprit to be Trapcode Particluar. I have Particular 2.2 running and it was spitting out a lot of particles. I have found that when I turn off that layer, everything renders very quickly, even my 20k images in less than 3 seconds. I then turned Particular on again and reduced the number of particles by more than half. My render time dropped from 30-40 seconds, down to 12 seconds. That is great... still not as fast as I would like though because AE/Trapcode still only uses one core to calculate and render.

Now that this has been narrowed down to a Trapcode issue, can anyone explain why it is only using one core?

Thanks!

Hi Todd,

I am aware that MP is complex. When I said it has been narrowed down to a Trapcode issue, I meant that in this case, Trapcode is my biggest issue for a slow response, however, AE still underpowers itself even when I am working in comps that have no Trapcode or third party plugins involved.

AE is just inefficient and I don't know why.

I am attaching an image of a simple render - two 20k jpgs overlayed on one another. That is it. The render takes about 5 seconds, and you can see the CPU activity that takes place is primarily on 1 core out of 24. Even though I have reduced the number of cores AE can use down to 8, with 4GB each - only using 1 is very ineffient and I wonder why AE CC is not taking advantage of my computer. That 5 seconds could surely drop to 1 if those 8 cores I gave AE were utilized.

To this end, when I render using the Background Renderer Script as seen here: http://aescripts.com/bg-renderer/ the utilization of my computer is far beyond what AE will natively do. This wouldn't be a problem if the BG Renderer script also sped up the in-comp render speed, but obviously it doesnt and I am forced to wait on AE to do it in its own sweet time.

Thanks for any further insight you have.

That is actually GREAT to hear. Outside of telling me that I just needed to change a setting and 'viola', this is the best news you could have given me. Give my regards to 'the binary guys' and I will look forward to their update. Any idea on a timeline for any major breakthroughs? Weeks/months?

Thanks!

I want to add a final note in here. I did some additional testing this morning and was able to find a solid sweet spot for AE based MP rendering. It was a 1920 comp with a large jpg that had AE effects, Ball Action and Add Grain applied. Without MP the render was about 27 minutes, with MP is was just over 2. The computer utilized about 60% of itself for this render, which is better than normal. When I used the Background Renderer that I mentioned above, in this case, it was slower, coming in around 5 minutes. The BG Renderer seems just as hit or miss as AE itself. Largely depends on the comp.