Aerender multithread work around

[Tcinator]

Looking for information on an official recommendation for farm rendering with AE 2015/2017. We are aware of the lack of multithreading and have experienced extremely low CPU utilization on running aerender on windows machines. Is there any official documentation providing insight on how to fully utilize a render farm with AE? As far as we have seen, for 2015, the only way to effectively use our farm machines is to launch about 8 aerender instances. Please advise.

I was told by Adobe support to post on the forums because they do not provide troubleshooting through their support. Maybe my support transcript will help:

Shipra Singh: Hello! Welcome to Adobe support.
Shipra Singh: Please allow me 1-2 minute(s) to review your account details.
Me: Thank you.
Shipra Singh: multiprocessing is only good with 4K+ mionitors
Shipra Singh: welse it will slow down system
Shipra Singh: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/automated-rendering-network-rendering.html
Shipra Singh: this is official blog for farm rendering
Me: I have seen this document many times. our issue is when running aerender on our farm machines, a single instance only gets up to 5-15% cpu usage on our PC based machines. we are not using multithreaded rendering. this issue arose when switching from 2014 to 2015.
Me: I have been told that aerender, starting with 2015, is no longer a multithreaded application. is that the case?
Me: these are 48 core, 64 GB machines and are not being utilized in the slightest.
Shipra Singh: yes it doesn't do multithreaded
Me: and that change happened between 14 and 15? can you confirm?
Shipra Singh: it has happened in 2015
Me: Ok. what is the proper workflow now that our machines are severely under utilized? Are we to launch multiple aerender instances to utilize our machines?
Shipra Singh: I apologize, we have restricted the support for how to issues on chat or call. You can post your queries on forums.adobe.com , by signing in there and our experts will reply you on the same
Shipra Singh: you can put questions on either forums link
Shipra Singh: https://forums.adobe.com/community/aftereffects_general_discussion/aftereffects_sdk

[Wim_Schalley]

Hi,

launching multiple instances of aerender.exe is how I do it.

I built an app around it. I drop ae projects in a list. The app starts an aerender.exe process for each core in my system. It checks the exit codes for errors and restarts a process if required.

Unusable for single file containers (avi, QT, mp4) but very good for image sequences.

PM me (wim@thepostman.be) if you want more details.

Wim