rendering loses multicore performance by time
by wim roegels
on
Sep 14, 2009 at 10:06:16 am
Hi all,
hopefully i was not to stupid to use the search right, but i have a really strange problem and i do not know how to cope with it.
If I start rendering a comp, everything works really well and AE (AElink) uses nearly all of the CPU power. After a while the usage drops down and the estimated time in the renderque rises.
I am not shure what to do, so far I updated the OS to snowleopard, increased RAM, reinstalled CS4, rebooted a couple of times, tried with an own user without luck.
Re: rendering loses multicore performance by time by Dave LaRonde on Sep 14, 2009 at 3:41:28 pm
[wim roegels]"Does anyone have an idea? "
Yup. Here's the second-most-common cause for render woes -- using Open GL when rendering. Turn it off.
But lately, the #1 most common offender in such render woes is the nature of the footage imported into AE. Read on......
Dave's Stock Answer #1:
If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following -- footage in an HDV acquisition codec, MPEG1, MPEG2, mp4, m2t, H.261 or H.264 -- you need to convert it to a different codec.
These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.
In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA
Re: rendering loses multicore performance by time by wim roegels on Sep 14, 2009 at 5:09:10 pm
Thanks for your response!
So far I do not have any special compressed footage in any comp: a couple of (big) PNGs used for different 3D Layers, green screen footage with Keylight (maby that causes the slow down) and that's it.
Should not be a big deal.
I thought on using the Adobe Media Encoder as Alternative, but there are no setup possibilities to define the multi core usage - i would guess its the same like putting it into the AE que, but it uses even less horse power.
If keylight is the bittlekneck, are there keying plug ins supporting multicore?
Re: rendering loses multicore performance by time by Christian Hughes on Oct 15, 2009 at 3:41:06 pm
Hi there
Really interesting answer - Finally someone might be able to explain the problems I have been having!
I am using machine with an i7 processor, 8 gig ram, vista 64 bit.
I am capturing HDV footage into Premiere Pro CS4 as mpeg format 1080i. I have been doing a bit of colour correction on the footage both in Premiere and After Effects. When I come to export the movie as either a WMV or MOV through media encoder, the rendering starts off super quick (I can view all 8 cores on a widget on the screen), but then the processor usage will suddenly drop down to only using 1 core (and the ram usage will shoot up), the rendering may or may not kick back into using the rest of the cores, or it may just hang and never finish.
The effects arent complex on it, so have been wracking my brain as to why media encoder is having such a tough time.
Do you think the fact I am using captured HDV footage might be the problem here? If so, what would you use to convert it?
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Re: rendering loses multicore performance by time by wim roegels on Sep 14, 2009 at 5:12:35 pm
Thanks for the hint, I already updated AE.
The strange thing fo me is, that it starts rendering with using all power, and while rendering the usage decreases - i extended RAM already.
I am not really getting it?
So far I used the normal Uninstaller to do a fresh install - should I use the script as an alternative. So far I thought this one is only for corrupted installations, where the deinstallation does not work at all ...
Re: rendering loses multicore performance by time by wim roegels on Sep 15, 2009 at 7:22:22 am
Mac Pro, 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core, 14 GB RAM 800 MHz DDR2.
AE Prereferences:
RAM that can be used by other Programs: 1 GB
Minimum RAM per CPU: 2GB
Slider completly set up "Fast Render"
CPU's that can be used by other Programs: 2
