TIFF sequences so much faster
by Conrad Olson
on
Apr 10, 2008 at 11:17:24 am
I've been using Background Renderer to render out some large compositions to Animation QuickTimes that were taking about 3 hours each. Things have been going a bit crazy here and AE kept crashing or we had to stop the renders part way through. I decided to start rendering them to TIFF sequences so I could continue a render if it got interrupted.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that the are now only going to take about an hour each. Why is there such a big difference? I'd understand if I was doing it to a compressed QuickTime format but I thought rendering to Animation didn't add much overhead.
I'm just trying to understand what is going on so I can work a little more efficiently. Thanks.
Re: TIFF sequences so much faster by Conrad Olson on Apr 10, 2008 at 11:23:22 am
I should also add that my computer has become very unresponsive during these renders. It seems that the reason they are rendering faster is because Nucleo is taking more resources. I've just paused the render and the computer is back to it's usual zippy self. I've check that Nucleo's priority is still set to normal.
I'm using an octo core Mac with 6GB RAM and the latest update of Nucleo.
Re: TIFF sequences so much faster by Steve Forde on Apr 11, 2008 at 12:00:21 am
This is consistent with RAM starvation. You have 8 CPU's fighting over only 6 GB of RAM. This is why the quicktime takes so long - there isn't any room for Quicktime to convert to even an uncompressed Animation (uses decent RAM).
The TIFF sequence is avoiding this step - hence the speed increase.
You need to either install more RAM (minimum 2GB per core), or alternatively - lower the number of CPU's NP2 uses to say 2 or 3 - this will ensure that you don't run out of RAM.
Re: TIFF sequences so much faster by Conrad Olson on Apr 11, 2008 at 1:33:04 pm
Cool, so I reduced the number of cores used by Nucleo Pro to 4 and it hasn't had that much effect on the speed of the renders and now my machine is much more usable while background render is running. I guess I'll have to convince my boss we need another 10GB ram.
