Slow ram previews with CM - still??

[kaczorefx]

It's been said here a lot - color management in AE is unusable - not because it's bad, but because it's nearly impossible to get a real time preview when CM is on.

I've got a 24core 96GB workstation and I can't get  this to work!!!!

They way it's always explained is this:

Normally AE operates like that:

project calculations ---> cached images ---> display

When CM is enabled it goes like this:

project calculations in selected color space ---> cached images ----> conversion to display color space ----> display

and it's this Conversion to display profile that is being done on the fly that is just not coping - no wonder it's basically an effect we want AE to calculate in real time.

That is also why zooming out of the preview to 50% fixes the issue - at 50% there is 4x less pixels to convert.

Now my question:

can someone explain why in the hell this display conversion has to be done on the fly? Why isn't it burned in into the cached files? Honestly how often do you expect someone to change his display color profile while previewing so that your workflow will not loose the image cache because of that?? This never happens - the display color profile is a constant, why calculate it on the fly???

My only idea for this is when we have a second reference monitor connected - it will have a different profile than the work monitor - this way from the same image cache we can display the image on both monitors with different profiles on the fly. Well great, but that's even worse as now AE has to do two conversion on the fly - one for each display - sometimes 50% zoom out of the preview is not enough - it will still be choppy!!!. If you're really thinking about that situation then seriously let me choose which display's color profile to burn into the cached files. If I have a reference monitor connected to my workstation then that is the monitor I'm going to look at when viewing colors - I don't care about proper color on my working monitor. What I do care about is being able to view my preview in real time.

And all this talk is about a 1080p composition!!! On a 24 core machine!!!! We're slowly moving to 4k displays and 4k comps. With these resolutions I have previews at 2 frames per second!!!!! The same comp with CM disabled runs smoothly at 60fps!!

Do you now see how unusable your approach to CM really is?

[Mylenium]

Monitor conversion is applied at the app level/ via Mercury playback. It has nothing to do with the cache itself. Other than that it's the old rule of al CM: Never ever burn a monitor profile into any of your images (unless you need to correct a screenshot). The CM per se isn't the issue, anyway. It's AE's inefficient drawing pipeline. It's ironic that you could probably cobble together a simply RAM player with full CM using the Qt UI libraries and it would fare much better than Adobe's proprietary stuff...

Mylenium

[kaczorefx]

That's what I mean - if they can't do it properly - burn the cm  into cachefiles. They have no problem playing back from them so just use what works for now. I'd rather have a working CM burnt into cache files than a not working CM - wouldn't you?

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Kaczorefx,

Give your feedback to our team via a bug report.

Thanks,
Kevin