Many have said that the funds are unable to acquire good luck to you, and anyone who says they can is not using after effects. In some 1 of this series of articles i said that there are situations where spending more money will not speed up the rendering of after effects, and even though the above is generally true for multi-core processors and gpus, there are other ways to raise the level recoil, but they are absent. It's not all about money.
In this article, i'm going to look at how changing your workflow and project settings can greatly increase the performance of after effects, most often without spending anything at all.Work smarter, affordably
Spend is easy. Persuading people to throw money away so we don't have to work profusely makes the advertising industry work. Initially, we were sold vacuum cleaners, so people didn't have to physically beat out carpets and rugs. Now they sell us robotic vacuum cleaners, so we don't even have to vacuum. If the person does not want to cook, we can eat out and pay one another to cook for us, and if the commission cooks at home, then we can buy a dishwasher to wash the dishes. It's easy to throw money at what's easy if the family has money.
If we compare more economical computers with more expensive ones, we expect to see the best performance for our money. It's fair to assume that if the issue boils down to poor performance, then it can be solved by spending more money. For some applications isn't it. If we look at cpu-based 3d rendering, spending more on more cpu cores will definitely speed up the rendering process. For 3d games, the current more expensive gpu handles more frames per second (if you don't mean quadros). Absolutely all we have to do is shell out the money.
But when we get to the after effects, it's a completely different story - at least today in 2020. We are able to buy the usual expensive processor and gpu from private sellers, and this will not leave our renders much faster than a much more expensive computer. In fact, without third-party rendering software, a more expensive processor can render after effects compositions (slightly) slower than a larger cheaper model. This is the transport that our firm covered in parts five of 6: after effects is predominantly single-threaded, which is why its performance is mainly dependent on the cpu clock speed.
But modern cpus are geared towards more cpus. Cores, but not faster. Extremely expensive processors have the most cores but are present at lower clock speeds, but it is enough to buy more economical processors with fewer cores that run at the highest clock speeds. Since after effects works better with the most severe clock speeds than with a large number of cores, a cheaper cpu with a very high clock speed will provide better performance at a lower cost.
Google's brief review suggests the most expensive the amd processor is the 3990x offering 64 cores for about $4000. However, the base clock speed reaches 2.9 ghz, and after effects simply cannot use most of these cores. A few months ago, intel announced a new "core i9 10900k" and although it only has 10 cores instead of amd 64, intex manufactures a boosted clock speed of up to five.3 ghz. What is extremely priority, it's only 1000 bucks - 1/4 the price of the amd flagship. In the case where you are building a setup for only after effects and after effects, then the intel i9 10900k will provide faster after effects rendering at a better price than the amd 3990x. This is only true for after effects - i'm not saying that the intel processor is better or faster than the amd processor by the rules and regulations. If we were comparing vray renders, it would be a completely different story. The problem is not with intel and amd, but with after effects and multithreading.
This is the stage where this series began: the observation that macpro does not process after effects projects faster than imac, it costs 1 -3% price. The easiest way to spend a lot of money on the "box of god", but after effects simply does not apply all the available power.
If after effects render happiness faster, then sorry, the money will get you up to still.
Spending credit is easy if you eat it, but that's one way to increase productivity. There are many other methods to speed up the work of after effects, but this will require additional work from the user.In some circumstances, a number of elementary steps lead to a significant increase in speed, however, to achieve the desired result, you need to rethink how you use after effects. The point is to serve more effectively, even if it can be associated with jumping through hoops.
After effects are not ideal. It is old and at the moment it is relatively slow and sluggish. But this also applies to all after effects customers. Spending a budget can easily shorten the way you've worked for years - no. But the point of this article is that if you don't mind changing the way you work, the customer has a chance to see more performance gains than if needed, the observer would simply buy a more expensive processor.
Summary: part 3 - and all these figures
Many things wrong with after effects are outlined in parts 2 and 3. In the second part, i looked at what after effects does: it is a tool that processes bitmaps. Most of the food that is after effects provides loading a bitmap and performing calculations for all the pixel. Then everything repeats again.
In part 3, i considered how quickly the volume of pixels grows with a higher image resolution and what are the technical problems of after effects over the years. . When i started working in 1997, i was dealing with 8-bit projects in the traditional resolution - 720 x 576. One frame took about 1 megabyte (1.6 mb with alpha channel). Now the industry demands 8k hdr images, and a single frame is approximately 506 megabytes - that's half a gigabyte for a particular frame! - You can see 80 times the number of pixels that need to be processed. And moving from the 8-bit plan to the 32-bit plan needed for hdr means that the site has 4 times more data for each pixel.
So, to exaggerate the difference by comparing these two extreme situations. : One hdr 8k frame contains 320 times more data to process than one 8-bit sd frame.
If there is an 8-bit project, sd and the frame takes 1 second to render, then it should be assumed that it will take 320 seconds to render a frame if we change it to 8k, hdr. But 320 seconds is almost five and a half minutes, and for most after effects users the idea is simply unacceptable for rendering a single frame.
In fact, the difference in rendering time will not be that big. , But the thing is, we're happy to easily lose sight of how much work we're asking after effects to do.
Every time we double the resolution, the number of pixels to process increases repeatedly.
The timeframe they change
After effects in 1997 was understandably different from the current version of ae this year, but there are other differences as well. Than a year after year list of new features. Some changes reflect the evolution of the industry itself, and the development of characteristics for tapes and visual effects.
After effects in 1997 only processed 8-bit images without color management. After effects 2020 can run in 8-bit, 16-bit or 32-bit (hdr) mode with color management features. These are not just new features, they are now fundamental industry requirements.
But these settings also have a significant impact on performance, as they directly affect the amount of processing that after effects must perform on a direct pixel. And the amount of processing required per pixel is directly related to overall performance.
It's easy to have default after effects settings that you hardly change or don't think about very much. For many after effects users, the project defaults to 16-bit color, srgb or rec 709 color, and hd help. Some may deal in 8-bit mode, others in 32-bit mode. There are ae users working with sd(!), While others usually work with 4k and 8k quotes. But if you always work with the same types of projects day in and day out, it's easy to forget that you can change the main project settings with a single click.
Statement of the problem …
Summarizing everything that we have considered in previous articles, we are able to summarize the main problems facing after effects and performance:
• After effects are, first of all, , an application for processing bitmaps • the denser the pixels in the bitmap, the more volume ae must process • the number of pixels in the image increases exponentially with increasing resolution • in addition to the number of pixels, after effects still has settings for the number of bits per pixel. A 16-bit image takes up 2-3 times more memory than an 8-bit one.A 32-bit image takes up four times as much memory as an 8-bit image. • Color management, a modern requirement for professional graphics, requires every pixel to be processed in some way.
enable, turn off
Looking at it this way, we propose to see two approaches to improve the performance of after effects apart from various computer hardware:
1) reduce the number of pixels that are only can process after effects 2) reduce the number of calculations that after effects have to perform for all pixels
At first, this may seem impossible - if your project requires delivery in a high quality format or 4k, but you certainly can't really change the song to make it smaller!
But while your final version may have a fixed resolution, rhea ripley transparent png renders eg. 1920 x 1080, you can of course switch some settings while you work to increase your productivity. It might be one you're already making, or it might take learning some new manufacturing process practices. If the player changes the pre-learning permission from "full" to "half" or "quarter", then you're on the right track. There are many settings our pastry chefs can toggle to improve the number of pixels processed by after effects, and the judicious use of pre-melodies and pre-trial renders can shift the burden of rendering from the "final" rendering. Often after effects can play more and more processing than you think - some file formats require noticeably more effort than others.
Something simple, like rendering to another extension, or pre- treatment. Rendering one format to the required one can make a big difference - and without paying.
Example: looks fast or looks funny
One example would be color management and prefetching. Viewing in ram. . As detailed in part 13, in our days, after effects have not, under all circumstances, been able to play the ram preview in real time or in sync with audio. Even in the mostmost common latest versions of cc 2020 there are still not all right with nvidia specific drivers and 32bit line projects. If you're solely focused on creating motion yourself, or if that's a big problem, motion design means you really have to look at how your animation plays reliably in real time. But as long as you're working, if you're concentrating on animation - setting up keyframes and movement - then color accuracy may not be as critical. You may find that disabling "display color management" has a noticeable performance impact - your colors may change slightly, but you get a real-time ram preview. If you're happy with the moving elements of your design, re-enable color management when it's time to focus on color - color grading doesn't often require perfect playback speed.
So you can think of color management as a kind of productivity switch turning it on and off allows you to focus on either movement or color accuracy. And while you'll probably need both for the final render, you'll get a great chance to focus on one thing as you go along.
What this button does…
compared to 1997, after effects now has a lot of switches and settings that we can toggle, and all of them can have a big impact on the overall speed of after effects. Here is the list:
• Project bit depth • project rendering - software or gpu • composition resolution • composition preview resolution • composition aspect ratio conversion • composition roi • project color control • display color control • footage color control
Each of these options can significantly affect the amount of processing that needs to prepare the after effects, and until now we don't forget about the settings needed for full" output, we can switch them, working on balancing performance.
Depending on what type of work you perform and what assets you use, many of these settings have more or less impact than 2d. For example, if all your assets are square pixels, then "aspect ratio conversion" will have no value.If you exclusively use plug-ins without gpu acceleration, switching between software and graphics rendering is also possible without making a noticeable difference.
If you work on the same types of projects for the same the same clients, it is possible to have a default project/melody setting that you hardly think. But in general there is a list of settings that together can make more difference to rendering speed and preview than hardware upgrades. Effects is used by a lot of different people in a lot of cases. In addition, it has been offered in some 1 - there is no such thing as a typical after effects user. Depending on the type of activity you do, and the technical standards of your projects, your mileage may vary.
Let's start with the simple stuff.
Composition preview resolution and scale
When setting up a new after effects composition, the choice of resolution and frame rate is the most important detail. Most summaries will start with a technical delivery manual - usually 1920 x 1080, or let's say 4k.
But once the composition is created, you have the opportunity to study it and work with it at a lower resolution - in there is a simple drop-down menu at the bottom of the composition panel. This is the composition preview resolution. This is a basic after effects feature that has been around for as long as i can remember, yet i often see it overlooked as a performance switching tool. It's a drop-down menu of "full", "half", "third", "quarter" resolutions. These qualities determine the extension with which the composition window is displayed. If your composition has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 but the resolution is set to "half", after effects treats the composition as if it were painted at a resolution of 960 x 540. As people have considered in some 3, that's ¼ of the number of pixels, which is why the rendering time can be much less. 4 times faster. If you set the singles resolution to a quarter, you get 1/16 of the number of pixels, so the composition preview will be 16 times faster.
As higher resolutions become more popular, extra pounds is nothing special for after effects. Compositions must be larger than the monitor if they are shown. Not all after effects consumer sits at a 4k computer. Even a regular 30 inch monitor with 2560 x 1440 resolution is a minimum of time than hd. If your monitor has a resolution of 2560 x 1440, by the time you set up your workspace with panels and timeline, you may find that the main composition window is not large enough to display a 1920 x 1080 image at 100% scale.
So you're doing what every ae artist does every month - zoom out. By pressing "," and "." The keys - even when you dream of them as " " keys - zoom in and out. It's something you often do all the time without thinking, a key ae fragmentation that's ingrained in muscle memory. At the bottom of the composition panel "zoom" now shows 50%. Most likely you've set it to dynamically scale the composition window, so it might display something else.
But if the scale doesn't match the preview, the after effects scale the preview as well. Display the structure in the composition window - and this still takes time. For example, in quite a bit, however it adds a bit to every frame. The key point here is to match the scale with the resolution of the preview. Upscaling the bouquet preview resolution means you don't spend minutes rendering material at a single resolution, but end up scaling it up or down. There is an "auto" setting in after effects that toggles it for regulars when zooming in and out, but still it can wreak havoc with your cached frames, given the above i usually turn it off.
the larger your composition and source material, the more significant the impact of composition resolution and scaling can be. As footage at 4k resolution and above becomes the most popular, it's more likely that ae artists working at their song's scale will be scaled down by up to fifty percent%. But, if the preview resolution is set to full", this implies that ae displays 4 times more pixels than the user sees, and scales them down, which slows everything down.
The day will come all the time, in case you need to function at 100% zoom and full resolution, even in the specified case, your hours and days of rendering and initial viewing will be as it is . But cooperating at half resolution means you render 4x faster, in case the user zooms out to fifty%, you might not see the difference, if at all.
Region of interest — roiThere are times when you are interested in working with your proposal at 100% resolution, 100% scaling and color management enabled. If you never work with that image, the region of interest can improve performance by rendering only the side you are looking at. This can be useful when you are masking or rotating a small area of a large plate. It's a feature, it's been in ae for years, but i rarely see people use it. It's a pity, because it's a very powerful tool for raising the level of feedback.
The region of interest is also useful for segmenting compositions. You can sketch out the area you want to crop, and at the end use the "crop hit by industry of interest" function in the "composition" diet. You have the ability to look at ram for much longer than a human would need to look at the whole screen, because smaller areas of interest take up less memory than the entire composition.
The bit depth project
The project bit depth allows you to switch between 8-, 16- and 32-bit projects. Why you prefer one criterion over another is beyond the scope of this article, but the bottom line is that a 32-bit project will take up more memory and require more processing than an 8-bit project. It has an impact on your advertised system - your cpu has to do more processing, your memory stores bigger clips, and your system bus sends more detailed data to various parts of your laptop. Storage and internet speeds will become noticeable bottlenecks if they need to store and transfer larger and larger files and your computer space will fill up faster.
Despite my exaggerated "worst case" example earlier, in 32-bit mode is not 4 times slower than rendering in 8-bit mode, just as rendering in 16-bit mode is not 2 times slower. In fact, the difference is substantially cheaper than you might think, although my attempts to find a reliable reference led to a whole list of erroneous results.
In one test composition using only solids, masks and strokes, an 8-bit render took 10 minutes 42 drops of its time, and switching to 16-bit mode took a short time of 5 seconds. Based on how you put it, 16-bit rendering was 50% slower than 8-bit rendering.
But in the second test project, 8-bit rendering took 3 minutes 34 seconds, while 16-bit rendering took 4 minutes a third of an hour, the difference is no more than 20%.
Another test is a "real" tvc that i recently worked on - 8 -bit rendering took 9 minutes 50 moments and 32-bit rendering took 11 minutes 6 seconds. Switching from 8-bit to 32-bit only increased rendering time by 12%.
Yes, those extra bits do take longer, but does that time seem to fluctuate between project to project and depends to a certain extent based on what type of resources you use.
If you are doing 32-bit hdr compositing, especially in linear space, it will be difficult for you to switch to eighth or 16-bit mode to speed things up. Up, as rendering differences can be too large. However, if you are creating motion graphics that do not require floating point calculations, the visual difference between 8-bit and 16-bit color may not be noticeable, while still offering a slight speed boost.
If you are color grading your footage material or collaborating with photographic images, then the 16-bit mode will give you more reliability when adjusting colors, as well as when applying a variety of effects. However, for more graphical approaches with flat colors, 8-bit ordering will do, and as a bonus to the slight increase in speed, you personally may also have more memory available for preview caching.
To work with animated graphics, you can work in eight-bit mode at any time, and at the end switch to 16-bit mode when rendering the final output. Switching between 8- and 16-bit modes will not betray the colors in your own project - they are also calculated with greater accuracy.It's like measuring something in millimeters, but not in millimeters - the measurement is more accurate, while the diameter of the object does not change. Switching between 32-bit and 8/16-bit modes is quite capable of changing colors, so if your final rendering will be done in a 32-bit approach to business, you are most likely to use 32-bit mode everywhere.
Color management
I have previously used the "display color management" setting as an example where we can toggle after effects settings at runtime to boost performance when we need it . Personally, i've discovered that display color management is the last factor that determines whether a 100% ram preview will play fully. Color-managed viewing. But color management goes beyond this setting and contains every element of captured information, and these days it's increasingly likely that you'll gain valuable knowledge from footage in color formats other than the rec 709 standard for hd. General project color management and specific footage products can be easily overlooked when it comes to performance, yet solution and footage color management can have an unimaginable impact on rendering speed.
When management color enabled - the favorite "work area" is set to a value other than "none". - After effects will automatically convert any footage marked as a different color zone, depending on the project settings. However, this can take a lot of extra processing behind the scenes, slowing down pre-play and rendering. Manipulating tint with a significant amount of source footage that is not native to your project requires many additional processing steps in its own workflow - every single pixel of each specific footage component will go through additional processing, including all ram previews as well as output renders. All of the above can be added instantly. This is especially true for solid resolution videos - never remember that the number of pixels in an image increases exponentially with increasing resolution.
Several major camera brands, including arri, canon and sony, make cameras that record footage in magazine format. Arri has logc, sony and canon have slog and clog respectively. These color formats must be converted to the same color space as the project, usually srgb or rec 709. Working with log files in a normal hd project is much slower than working with normal rec 709 prores files.
How much this will affect any portal depends on the differences between your original building material and your offer. If one has six rec 709 prores files, plus the rec 709 format for a specific case, no conversion of floral ideas is required: everything matches. But if the frames are in the next color space, for example, logc, clog, slog, or some other, then an additional color management process will need to be applied to each pixel of each frame. The landing page can slow things down a lot more than you think.
In a quick test, i imported a 3k prores file from arri alexa, which was written in the logc color space. The duration is a little less than half a minute. I set up a simple composition that scaled down the clip to 1-3% - 1066 x 600 pixels - and rendered the money and media as a simple prores 422 clip. 1 minute - 72 seconds. With color management enabled, the same thing took over 5 minutes to render - 305 seconds. Rendering the same thing but as logc prores (not the default rec 709) again added another 25 seconds to the render time, for a total of 330 seconds.
Source material: half a minute in logc prores format. File, 3k resolution
Color management off, rendering in prores: 72 seconds
Color management on, rendering in rec 709 prores: 305 seconds
Color management enabled, rendering in logc prores: 330 seconds
So, in this very simple example with someone layer, using log footage took four times as long for rendering. .
In another test, i imported 5 prores files and layered them one on top of the other in a 10 second composition.I changed the interpretation of all prores files and measured render times:
Source: 5 prores files layered on top of each other in a 10 second composition
Color management disabled : 28 seconds
Prores as rec 709: 28 seconds
Prores as logc: 215 seconds
Prores as clog and slog : 207 seconds
Prores as rec 709, rendering to srgb: 32 seconds
In this case, with 5 layers of prores files instead of just one, the rendering time increases over 7 times when using logarithmic footage. But it's worth realizing right away that if your portal is srgb oriented and your footage is rec 709, which would be the default for a huge number of users, there is still color management overhead when converting from rec 709 to srgb. It's not so bad - spend 32, not 28 - despite this, there is.
Color management does not have so much effect on maps created by after effects itself - strokes, text layers, complexion layers etc.. And if you're importing a lot of footage, especially footage whose color space is different from the idea, then turning color management on and off can make a big difference. The trouble with this statement, the approach comes down to the fact that disabling color management can cause the footage to look very different - the solution is to pre-render to a faster format. Which brings customers to our next topic…
Don't forget the presets and queues you have
I joked on twitter a while ago that you get a chance to say whether the after effects user came from a vfx design or background with their precompositions. In my experience, designers hate precompositions and avoid them everywhere, settle down. External effects artists are much more likely to do pre-composition.
The use of pre-songs and pre-trial renders can significantly affect the rendering time of after effects projects. Using pre-composites and pre-rendering if possible, that's basically all i had in mind earlier about boosting my workflow.
Render earlier, render more often.
+> Pre-composition and pre-rendering are probably the biggest performance boosts in after effects.
In several previous articles, i wrote that "final" after effects rendering effects composition can take up a surprisingly small fraction of the total time a firm spends on a project. If you personally have days, weeks or even months to talk about various ways to lose weight, and the same after effects project, then most of this time after effects does not render the "final" output. Meanwhile, usually, which you spend on working on a project, after effects, you will agree, does not process anything. It's okay to bet on the render queue only when you really need to render something.
We can capitalize on this time by taking it to pre-render layers and components that require a whopping amount time. Render. The main after effects of underutilization of processor cores remains the case that it is possible to render objects in the background without significantly slowing down the main after effects application.
Although third-party rendering software is needed here, the purchase price script is not as significant as a major hardware upgrade.
Regular pre-rendering is a way of thinking. Some users - and in my opinion only design people - often avoid pre-rendering in order to retain maximum flexibility in one large composition. But when used wisely, pre-rendering saves a huge amount of time by moving the render time back from the final deadline. By using the cpu for background rendering, and then using pre-rendering in the compositions that have appeared, the performance overhead is shifted from the cpu to your storage (and possibly the network).
It's much faster to load a frame from cd than render it again, especially with the latest ssds.
King is a good example. In a situation where you're compositing a performer in the background (visual effect 101), then keying your shots can take up to an hour and pay attention to doing it right. This is a nuisance, i covered it extensively in this 5 part master class on chromakey in after effects.If the user thinks to follow each step, then keying will involve de-graining the original footage before using keying, possibly merging multiple layers along with different keying settings, and then further filtering the keying areas.
All these precautions are in combination can lead to a heavy “final” melody, then slowly visualize, and this means that working with it and viewing it ahead of time will be tiring. Pre-rendering in various ways results in a key file that is quick to work with and naturally previews at a real-time pace.
You can see many performance improvements by doing the pre-rendering steps your composition is in the background. If you start a project that involves a lot of keying, you get the opportunity to: start by setting up and initially rendering all your frames with a denoising filter. Once your frames have been rendered, you have a great opportunity to pre-render again before doing any frame-by-frame cleanup. Drawing frames individually is certainly much easier if you're directly with a pre-rendered file rather than a heavy composition. Any time spent hoping for a pre-render can be repaid many times over.
As i said, this takes the load off your processor and successfully counters it on the resulting hard drives. When you do a lot of pre-rendering you will fill up your tires faster however and this allows if you are organized and clean up junk files most often. However, in general, investing in fast ssd storage for after effects is an ideal use of someone else's money than investing in an expensive multi-core processor that will not be used.
P for proxy After effects proxy feature allows you to pre-render singles, and then switch between pre-render and actual compositing. This can be useful if you decide to keep track of where your pre-renders were pulled from, or if you need to go back and look at your original composition.
You can pre-render at lower resolutions than yours a real composition that can automate production techniques on parts of a project before you turn off the proxy to render the "final" version at 100% resolution.
There are many educational literature and articles introducing the application proxy servers and demonstrating how they can sometimes dramatically improve your performance and rendering speed.
File formats
After effects is able to function with a wide variety of file formats. Every day we work with jpg, tiff, png, ai and eps files and these video formats like prores. However, few formats are the same. So here's one important piece of advice for you when it comes to performance:
Don't use png.
Yes, pngs are popular. They are everywhere. Some people recommend using png files instead of tiff files, but don't do it. They are slow. I didn't know that png files were much slower than other file formats until i started doing some tests.
Png files are so slow that i even checked in adobe to see if this kind of error. Perhaps this is a mistake. They are, and it's caused by the compression algorithm they use.
The higher your resolution, the slower these predictions are effective.
By the time we enlist 8k resolution, a png file takes about 20 times longer to obfuscate than a jpg or tiff file. In the terms of reference that i used to confirm the rendering speed of any file format, rendering to a jpg sequence took ae about 2 minutes 20 seconds (140 seconds). Rendering the exact same image to a png sequence took over 40 minutes.
Yes, that's right, just rendering to a png sequence instead of a jpg sequence increased the rendering time from 2 minutes to 40 minutes.
Just use tiff files.
Captain's log
I mentioned earlier that color management affects performance, and, if the imported material boasts a color space from the reigning after effects project, then each pixel of each frame requires additional processing. I noticed listed with quotes arri logc, thanks to this, that this is the format that i am most often given, but one is unmistakable for both sony and canon log formats. Log formats are popular because they record a more diametrical range of brightness values than regular 709 recording.The increased latitude you get with quality cameras is one of the leading reasons you would choose it, and the log format is key to retaining the full dynamic range of an image. But as people have seen before, processing the footage can seriously add weight to the resulting plans.
The solution is to pre-render to a new format that loads faster, and the exr sequence remains an obvious candidate here, although you can still select the rec 709 prores electronic file. The whole point of writing in the log color space is to preserve the large dynamic waves and the large color range, so if we want to recode this or a similar logc sentence into the required format, we need to choose a format with the same wide range. That's exactly what exr files are. However, the various compression algorithms used by exr are much faster to process after effects than the color conversion needed for logc, clog, and slog.
If you happen to be in 32-bit linear mode, then prerender of any logarithmic material into a linear exr sequence means that the color processing is done only once - during pre-rendering. After you import the exr sequence, it can be located in its own color space as your project ae - 32-bit linear - and therefore captured the material does not require additional color management processing during the run. This can lead to a significant performance boost in your workflow.
As an example, i used the same 3k logc clip as before and built a simple ae composition with it. Rendering with the original logc prores files took just over 5 minutes - 303 seconds. However, after replacing the logc prores files with a pre-rendered exr sequence, the rendering time was reduced to one minute 41–101 seconds. To be more precise, thanks to the professional rendering of log c files and rescheduling them in exr, the final rendering was three times faster. This is for a simple composition with only the first layer - you can see a lot of disparity and solid benefits when working with many layers.
Source: 3k arri log c prores
Rendering a 30 second clip with logc as source: 303 seconds
Rendering a 30 second clip after converting to exr: 101 seconds
This approach is not only for those working with 32-bit computers. Log frames are increasingly in demand. If you happen to be in a traditional hd project with rec 709 color, pre-rendering any log footage to rec 709 will also greatly improve performance.
Feels rawAt that as after effects clients are probably used to downloading prores quicktimes and mp4, there has been a significant development of digital cameras over the past decade, most of which record footage in their own proprietary format.
At the same time as arri alexa writes a standard prores file that can be immediately opened in any application that reads quicktime files, other camera manufacturers write in raw form, which must be processed before you can see it. Red, which were the first to use "raw" frames, have their own r3d format. Blackmagic followed suit and some of their cameras offer a 'braw' format option.
In these cases, the equipment does not record a normal image, it is recommended to use it directly to study on the screen. Instead, they record "raw" information from the camcorder's image sensor, and they must be converted to an image before they can be used. This process is called "debayerization" and is extremely cpu intensive.
In recent years, after effects can import r3d files by default, and support for braw files is provided through the autokroma plugin. Perhaps better known for his "after codecs" product. Interacting directly with raw frames means that the better has access to any available image data, but performance is at stake.
Again, pre-rendering to a different, faster format can result in faster project - again, i recommend the exr sequence. The initial rendering might take some time, but once the footage is converted to something faster for processing, the whole project will run a lot faster.
As a quick test: i just opened the file r3d and 60 full resolution frames were previewed in free memory. It took 96 seconds. I then pre-rendered it as an exr sequence, imported it and ram previewed it at 100% resolution.It took 31 seconds, about 3 times faster.
Source: r3d 8k file, 60 frames duration
Preview from ram, r3d file: 96 secondsRam preview, exr sequence: 31 seconds
Waiting for idle chatter
Changing the song preview and scaling options has an effect on the number of pixels processed in your current tune, and using an area of interest can temporarily minimize the number of pixels that after effects work on in a particular area.
But more important long-term improvements are predicted by limiting the volumes of minutes which after effects spend processing pixels that are never used - you can do that kind of cinematic experience with precomposition, prerendering and cropping.
I've already written about this some extreme examples of this - my the article described in detail how i was able to save time i'm rendering from quite a bit more than 5 minutes per frame to a couple of seconds per frame, cropping the layers down to size.
Exactly the same principle was behind t one of the "worst after effects projects" i've been into i soon saw a single photoshop 14k file duplicated hundreds of times in a single design, with any layer masked based on the required area, resulting in a render time of over three-quarters of an hour per frame. . By precomposing each layer and cropping it to the required size, the "final" rendering time was reduced to less than 10 seconds per frame.
A similar circumstance can gently arise. When reducing footage with increased resolution. We are open at a time when even inexpensive cameras can shoot at 6k resolution or even higher, however there are still ae artists in broadcast environments who deliver standard definition content. , Then pre-rendering your footage downsized to the resolution you need is another way to push the render time past the deadline.
I was working on tvc recently and the background plate was filmed with a blackmagic pocket camcorder at 6k resolution. The tvc itself has been compiled and is available in hd format. Pre-rendering the background plate with hd elimination reduced the final render time significantly, as not only was the image no longer downscaled from 6k to hd, however, due to the rendering to exr sequence, the footage did not need to be processed from blackmagic raw. Whenever i looked at it.
Reducing the amount of nonsense that after effects has to handle, so much so when it comes to rendering functionality that i wrote two after effects scripts to to help automate the rendering process. Process. The first script is the one i mentioned in the previous article and it is for vector graphics. It takes each film with multiple masks and copies each mask into a separate solid body, cropping each new solid body to fit the mask. By reducing the number of pixels in every unused layer, you can save a lot of rendering time.
A similar scenario takes a footage layer with many masks and composites the footage layer ahead of time. , Times for each mask and crops each individual pre-single to the size of each mask. This speeds up the creation of pre-products that can actually be pre-rendered, ultimately saving after effects from processing unnecessary pixels.
Wait here
After effects has been greatly improved in our days when the problem reaches down to memory management and caching, but there are still cases in which it has the ability to help. Sometimes after effects will display frames it doesn't need, but this can be fixed manually using hold keyframes.
To be fair, this is a pretty narrow issue, and it's able to be limited to adjustment layers , but i discovered this a number of months ago and for those years it radically differed my project, so it makes sense to share here.
In my case, i used an adjustment layer to animate the depth of field effect. Using the z-depth map and the camera lens blur result, i moved the focus from the background to the foreground and then back to the background. I noticed that after effects rendered every single frame, even though any of my source frames were still images. Since you will agree, nothing moved, there were no changes from the 1st frame to the next, and after effects did not have to re-render every frame - it had to cache the last frame and restart the generator.The keyframe values for the camera lens blur effect didn't change, but the after effects processed each frame anyway.
By manually changing the keyframes to hold, the after effects realized that nothing was the same and used the cached ones. Frames for significantly faster rendering.
What's in the oven
In more niche areas, expressions can often cause noticeable slowdowns, and this seems to be especially true when expressions are applied to lights or expressions that refer to similar expressions. After effects has a host frame helper that will convert expressions to keyframes, commonly referred to as keyframe baking, which defines all expressions and converts them into keyframes. This means that the expressions are not evaluated during rendering. Based on the phenomenon of what exactly you are doing, this leads to a significant performance improvement - it is the same from pre-rendering if you push the processing time away from the "final" rendering.
Here a simple lamp example is applied like emitters for particular. Any light source has an expression applied to its oscillation by means of a sinusoidal function. With expressions enabled, the total rendering time will be about 55 minutes. But after converting the expressions to keyframes, the rendering time is reduced to about 9 minutes.
Making adjustments
Adjustment layers are a wonderful substance, and in certain situations they also allowed to be used to improve rendering performance. If there are any effects or styles that you apply to all the layers in the sex composition, then using one adjustment layer will save after effects from repeating the same action over and over again. Blur, glow, focus, noise and grain are all effects that are usually added to layers to make you look your best and of course the same effects with the same settings are easily added to each layer in flower designs. Even something as simple as creating black and white footage can be applied with a single adjustment layer, rather than any single layer.
Mercury rising
More for several years, adobe has been steadily updating its personal plugins in order to take advantage of the power of graphics screws. A fresh release of after effects usually contains several additional plugins added to the list of citizens that benefit from gpu acceleration.
To use the gpu - if possible - the project must be set accordingly. If your project does not apply gpu-accelerated effects, you will never see any difference. But as the list of updated plugins continues to grow, after effects have even more and more options for the fastest rendering thanks to gpu processing. For more information on which plugins have been updated, visit the adobe website.
Virtual reality plugins that have already been included in after effects are unique in that these predictions are found with gpu acceleration enabled.I've tried testing a few projects to see what the difference is between software and graphics rendering, however, so far i haven't found any specific significant changes. Many of the tapes i've tried gave nearly the same rendering time for the vibe of the variant. The biggest difference i found was with a fairly complex composite, where the mercury gpu acceleration render time was exactly 26 minutes, and the program alone was 28 minutes. Development releases.Get in your back pocket
Many of the tips here don't involve losing money. While buying the latest multi-core processor is not required to speed up rendering, there are other ways where it makes sense to spend money to improve performance. Choosing to render a tiff sequence instead of a png sequence does not mean anything, but is able to speed up rendering by 20 times, which is nice. Pre-rendering multiple fast logc cycles in an exr sequence often results in a similar performance boost. And pre-layout components to cut off any unused areas of the image will also greatly reduce the amount of unnecessary processing that after effects must perform. Plugins available for purchase.A number of clones have tried to track every single after effects plugin, but i don't think anyone has been 100% successful, there are a lot of them.
If you don't mind paying, then in a lot of circumstances life third party plugins can provide faster and better results than native after effects plugins. The two most obvious examples i can think of are neat video's noise reduction plugin and frischluft's lenscare package. Both of these products duplicate functionality built into after effects: after effects has a "remove grain" plugin as well as a "camera lens blur" plugin, but the neat "denoise" and frishluft "depth of field" plugins are much faster. Because it also looks much more comfortable.
Instead of paying for hardware that works faster, you can pay for third-party software that works faster.
Better to understandAfter effects is such complex software used by such a diverse user base that it's nearly impossible to even try to explain the various software settings that affect overall performance. While many players don't intend with me - and that's okay - i also believe that there are different working cultures created between motion experts and visual effects artists that can still change the way users work with after effects and make their experience.
Personally, i pre-construct and pre-render whenever i can to shift the performance burden off the "final" rendering.
Unfortunately, this article is really in fact, only a superficial study of the manufacture of various working jobs, and the methods of action, in after effects, can affect the performance and timing of rendering. But there are some important tips that we hope will help you in the future.
The basic fact is that performance in after effects leads to the number of pixels processed and the abundance of calculations performed for each pixel.
Unfortunately, there is currently a speed limit where these calculations are done by the computer hardware, so spending a large amount of money on a monstrous multi-core processor does not guarantee faster rendering. However, by judiciously toggling the various settings in the after effects during the work period, our consultants will be able to control both the number of pixels processed, never the number of calculations performed for each of them. And in some cases it can lead to a significant difference in speed, all at no cost.
Here's a summary of some of the examples i've covered here:
- Don't use png. They are super slow. Just use tiff files.- Turn display color management on and off if you find it affects ram preview- turn on color management only when you need it, otherwise leave it disabled. - Choose your bit depth correctly. While i always advocate that users of after effects run at least 16-bit, simple flat graphic styles will run in 8-bit. While rendering isn't much faster in 8-bit mode, preplay and ram caching will benefit from having more free ram, all of which can improve your performance. Something faster, like exr sequences.- Precomposite and pre-render any layers that are significantly scaled down. In case you have a 4k, 6k or even 8k source material, but you are only working with stellar, pre-render at the resolution you want.- Pre-compose and crop any unused pixels. Maybe we have a performer who was filmed in front of a green screen... By that hour, if you turn it off, it can only take up a small part of the screen. Crop the desired area, pre-render, and after effects will process only the necessary pixels. – Are you using complex expressions? Try baking them, of course, if visitors have expressions that refer to other expressions. - If you find that you apply the same effect to each layer, for example. Color grading or lut, then try using a single adjustment layer instead.- If you're interacting with a huge composition that's scaled down to 50% or less, you can also set the preview resolution to half or ¼. Although a number of plugins will look different when rendering at a lower resolution, render times are much faster. Half resolution renders 4x faster, and 4x resolution renders 16x faster. - If you want to operate at 100% size and exceptional resolution, use an area of interest to isolate specific areas of the composition that you are focusing on. This frees up after effects from rendering the entire image, speeding up pre-play and taking up less memory.
And one more thing to mention is what i have covered in some 4 - network glitches and this is another throughput. The speed of various devices. In many workflows, article footage and other locations are delivered to external hard wheels, and you can regularly find motion and visual effects artists importing footage directly from external drives. The problem here is that they are an order of magnitude slower than internal hard wheels and much slower than ssd drives. Video files can get quite large, and reading 18+ movies from small, slow external hard drives is a huge performance bottleneck. Always transfer your video files to the fastest storage available.
There are other things i haven't covered - aspect ratio conversion, quick draft preview, layer quality, and scaling algorithms - but it's a decent starting point . As adobe continues to update after effects and improve gpu support and multithreading, we can look forward to a time when we don't have to jump through hoops just to make after effects happen faster. It's that long - precompose, prerender and you can forget about png!
This is part 15 of a long series of articles on after effects and performance. Have you read others? They are definitely different and extremely long:
Part 1: in search of perfection
Part 2: what after effects actually do
Part 3. Numbers to the end
Part 4. Bottlenecks and buses
Part 5. Introduction to the processorPart 6: the main wars have begun...
Part 7: spending time with aerender
Part 8: multiprocessing (like )
Part 9: cold hard cache
Part 10: the birth of the gpu
Part 11: rise of gpgpu
Part 12: the riddle of the quadro
Part 13: the wilderness years
Part 14: make it fast, free
Part 15 : third party opinions
And, of course, if you liked this series, then i have over a decade of articles on after effects to go through. Some of them are too long!