AE CS3 for intel-mac: drop the ball?

[Mylenium]

Well, not to be rude, but your comments lack the facts and sound like whining. Let's disect them.

Infact.. it performs exactly at the same speed in terms of rendering as our non-native aftereffects 6.5 in rosetta or whatever that thing is called.

If file I/O is more important than actual processing, you won't see any changes. In that case your disc performance is the decisive factor and you need to get that worked out.


Actually, I used to be able to run CS3 PS and lightwave and aftereffects at the same time, switching back and forth moving assests around and working all day long... but now, CS3 is bogging my system down.

How much RAM do you have? What are your cache settings? Do you use multiprocessing?


Also, aftereffects CS3 tends to take FOREVER to just freaking close,

That's a bug that should be fixed in the next mini update.


PS CS3 is SCREAMING FAST... Why can't AE see 8 cores. When you hit render you can see all 8 cores flickering between 20 and 60% usage, but most are at 20% while one is at 60%.. bummer... (oh we even tried the multiprocessor option in the pref. that says render multile frames at once) no noticeable change...

Without MP enabled, AE will never use 8 cores. It hasn't been different for older verisons of AE, so why are you complaining? Did anybody say that the render pipeline was changed completely? No. There are no such statements anywhere.

Sorry, you had false expectations and now you're disappointed because of them, not because something's wrong with the program.

Without MP, AE will use 2 cores at most and no more. Using more than 2 threads would require fundamental changes to AE itself and every plugin and those will not come before CS4 or CS5 even.

As for the insufficient MP performance - that would fall in line with my first comment. If you're only assembling frames, file I/O far outweighs any processing and becomes a bottleneck. Get faster disks/ RAIDS.

Mylenium

[Rickmeister]

I would agree with you when you said there were almost no big changes compared to After Effects 7 and 8, though you're saying that is didn't improved that much compared to AE6.5... than you surely are not an excesive AE user.

Version 8 (CS3) got some minor improvement (more like fixes i.m.o.), for example it makes better use of multiple cores now, and support more RAM. Though it, still, doesn't use all cores to there full capacity. Though there is an plugin out there that fixed this very well! (dunnow which one that was, sorry).

The biggest improvement is the whole changed interface (since AE7), what works a lot nicer and faster now.

[4dartist]

Ah thanks for the info Mylenium, it felt kinda rude but I can take it. True, lacked facts.. True I was whining..


How much RAM do you have? What are your cache settings? Do you use multiprocessing?
As I said in my post. 4GB of RAM, and I did turn on the MP option. Or is there another option that I am missing for MP? (if MP = multiprocessor) In the preferences, there is a tab called multiprocessor and there is a single checkbox in there. (it's checked) I'm not sure about the cache settings, i'll check it out.

I'm glad that closing bug will be looked at.

Without MP enabled, AE will never use 8 cores. It hasn't been different for older verisons of AE, so why are you complaining? Did anybody say that the render pipeline was changed completely? No. There are no such statements anywhere.
As I said, I tried to enable what I thought was the option for MP, i just don't know enough about how AE treats cores and MP. I never expected some massive change to the 'render pipeline', I guess I did hope to see the same improvement as I saw going from Lightwave PPC to Univeral Binary and Photoshop PPC to intel. They both were sooOOOOo much faster. With AE i just didn't notice any difference, except in the opposite direction. Now it's sluggesh and and multitasking on my computer is harder.

If you're only assembling frames, file I/O far outweighs any processing and becomes a bottleneck. I can see that. We do a lot of effects as well as assembling frames. Some shots have tons of layers and effects (that take some actual time per frame and some are simple. I don't do enough AE / video editing on this machine to justify a raid but that makes good sense.

I still love AE and think it's amazing software, i just wish it made good use of all the power computers have now. Gotta keep them plugin programmers on their toes!

[4dartist]

Rickmeister - Hehe ya not excesive by any means, just use it for a couple hours daily. I think 6 worked fine for the most part, thats why we never upgraded, but with us getting 8-core intel-macs it seemed a good time to get an intel version of PS and AE. So they wouldn't have to run in rosetta. As i used AE more I find some cool new things in the interface, like the zoom box on when using the motion tracker. That stuff is cool. I've never had a problem with the interface, and now it's even better. ;) Though there is an plugin out there that fixed this very well! (dunnow which one that was, sorry). No problem, I'm going to do some good ole' research and find out about that plugin. Thanks for your comments!

Ben

[Mylenium]

As I said in my post. 4GB of RAM, and I did turn on the MP option. Or is there another option that I am missing for MP? (if MP = multiprocessor) In the preferences, there is a tab called multiprocessor and there is a single checkbox in there. (it's checked) I'm not sure about the cache settings, i'll check it out.

It's called "Render multiple frames simultanously" and that's what it does - launch multiple instances of AE as background proceeses, each of which renders a frame or a short sequence of frames before sending it back to the master AE which ultimately will add it to the file or image sequence. Based on that scheme, you will only see noticable increase in performance, if processing those frames takes longer than it takes to shuffle them through the RAM or read and write them from/ to disc.

Anyway, on an 8 core machine 4 GB of RAM is insufficient. The master process itself will need about 1.5 GB and the slaves, of which 7 will be launched with the default cache and memory settings at least 512 MB each, so you already arrive at more than 5GB without actually rendering anything and the system begins to use the swap file. RAM consumption can go way up if you render HD stuff, so I'd advise against using MP on your system unless you get more RAM.

Mylenium

[4dartist]

Dang! really? It feels like yesterday I spent a fortune for another 8mb more of RAM... what happen! lol. Ya, I'm going to have to turn that off, that could be what is causing problems with my computer. I'll turn it off and watch how it performs. Thanks for the info.

Ben

[AAAron]

The plugins name are "nucleo pro 2" http://www.gridironsoftware.com/ but you have to check yourself if you think it suits your needs.

[Rickmeister]

The plugins name are "nucleo pro 2" http://www.gridironsoftware.com/ but you have to check yourself if you think it suits your needs.

Yeah, thats the one I was referring to.

[4dartist]

Thanks for the link, that software looks really impressive. I never knew there was something like that out there for AE. It may be a little overkill for us but we'll look into it more. They have some nice videos on the site too.

[beenyweenies]

Dang! really? It feels like yesterday I spent a fortune for another 8mb more of RAM... what happen! lol. Ya, I'm going to have to turn that off, that could be what is causing problems with my computer. I'll turn it off and watch how it performs. Thanks for the info.

Ben

My studio gets all of our mac RAM from Other World Computing. (http://eshop.macsales.com/MyOWC/Upgrades.cfm?model=250&type=Memory&TI=0226&shoupgrds=Show+Upgrades) They have their own house brand, which normally would be scary but their stuff is fantastic, cheap AND it's Apple certified. It costs about half or less what Apple charges.

With these new Intel/CS3 combos you should have around 2GB RAM per core if you want to take full advantage of them. If you at least add another 4-5GB you will be able to get 4 full cores worth of performance out of CS3, which should be plenty for your needs. If your studio is willing to buy octocore macs fresh off of the assembly line, paying $400 for an additional 4GB RAM shouldn't be that big of a deal.

All of that said, I would tend to agree with Mylenium that what you really need is a good RAID setup. Again, if your studio can afford octoMacs surely they can afford $300 for three extra 400GB hard drives. OS X has a built in RAID tool (in Disk Utilities) that makes it stupid easy to create a RAID 0 set from those drives.

[Darth Mole]

Nucleo Pro is great with four procs; with eight it'll be brilliant. Background rendering, spec preview, render queuing - it's genius. I think you'll love it.

Interesting to hear that AE CS3 still isn't very multi-processor aware - I thought it had been improved?

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