Nucleo seems to be hit and miss as to whether it helps or hurts based on the computer. I've had minimal success with it in the past, but on my newer personal computer it runs fantastic. And now on my latest brand new 64-bit dual-quad Xeon workstation it's having all sorts of problems with Nucleo. Is this a 64 bit issue, or needing a reinstall or what?
First of all, my projects are fairly complex as After Effects goes, however as I said my personal computer has run it fine including Nucleo previews and renders...Though now when I try and run that project on the new xeon 64 bit machine with twice the processing and twice the memory, nucleo takes longer to prepare to do anything, and it always comes up with an error code -6 the first time trying to render something. After that, it seems Nucleo renders blank video when trying to specify an output color space (but it works great if I set it to After Effects render).
Has anyone had these kinds of issues? It's interesting the differences on the same project between different computers. it's stressing me out with the deadlines I have.
Thanks for your help...I love Nucleo when it rocks, just not when it's a trainwreck!
Re: Please help, Nucleo Pro problems on new computer! by Eric Bintner on Mar 12, 2008 at 1:03:50 am
I've noticed many of the same symptoms. Nucleo did speed up my XP64 4-core Opteron machine last year with little effort on my part, but the 8-core Mac Pro using AE CS3 and Leopard took some tweaking to make efficient.
I have an 8-core Mac w/ 8GB RAM. I am testing a file I made on a mac mini running AE 6.5 (no nucleo). It took 2 hours to render on the mac mini, 32:54s to render on the Mac Pro without Nucleo and no multiprocessing and 33:18 to render WITH multiprocessing checked (8 memory starved cores = slower render).
My Nucleo tests have shown that with 8 cores, a Nucleo render is twice as fast as AE with multiprocessing no matter how I split the processing. (my comp is layers of video, 3D animation, nested .ai comps and other images -- probably 400-500 layers, 2min long, link to the animation)
Next I went through the Resource Settings in Nucleo and did a test render for 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 cores enabled.
4 cores - 13:04s
5 cores - 12:31s
6 cores - 11:21s!!!
7 cores - 12:24s
8 cores - 13:10s
All of these tests were with OpenGL turned on and all were about a minute slower with OpenGL turned off. Likewise, all of these tests were with Nucleo on normal performance setting and they all were about a minute slower with Max performance on (strangely).
I also had an issue with blank (all white) renders using Nucleo. It was because I used an alternate color management setting under the project settings menu. Seems Nucleo will only render with this setting set to "none" (default).
Another unresolved thing is that my nested .ai comps rendered perfectly with Nucleo, but the AE renders have produced very blury edges -- haven't had time to investigate that though.
So yeah. I cut a 2 hour render to 11min with a couple Xeons and Nucleo... 6 cores seems to be the magic # for me until I can afford to fill up the other 4 ram slots.
Hopefully you've had enough time to acquaint yourself with all the parameters within... And hopefully this will resolve your blank renders issue too.
Re: Please help, Nucleo Pro problems on new computer! by Devin Earthman on Mar 16, 2008 at 7:11:43 pm
Thanks for the help! I seriously consider these issues a 64 bit one, as Nucleo is a dream on my 32 bit quad core PC, but has the exact same problems on a mac pro and windows 64. I might install another 32 bit windows on this machine to compare, but of course I doubt Adobe will consider it another license, so I'll have to activate/deactivate every restart...
