After Effects Performance Rabbit Hole-Come Join Me!

[1v1mebro]

Topics Covered:
RenderBoss, Rendering, Puget Systems Benchmarks, General Feelings of Hopelessness and Buyers Remorse

My After Effects program was running a bit sluggish and had a bit of trouble churning through a rudimentary comp so I decided to run some benches, do some digging and solve this performance problem once and for all. [I haven’t yet…halp plz]

Puget Systems Render Node Benchmark:

Then I ran the Puget Systems Adobe After Effects CC Benchmark

Much to my dismay, my PC -
Which has specs of: core i9-7940X, GTX 2080, 128GB RAM, NVME drives for applications, scratch & cache, project files

Was unable to score above Mediocre in these benches. Performance in Premiere and After Effects is sluggish, inconsistent and poor for what I expected during the build process. This machine is getting trounced by a 9900K and the same amount of ram and same graphics card.

So I figured it was time to bring in a rendering assistance application

While most motion graphics artists use After Effects in a fairly traditional manner, many are starting to leverage multiprocessing plugins or homemade scripts like [BG Renderer Max] or [RenderGarden] to improve rendering performance. These typically leverage an application called “aerender” that is installed alongside After Effects that lets you divide up your render across multiple threads in order to fully utilize the performance of your CPU and GPU. In fact, the limiting factor is often the amount of RAM and VRAM you have available since each thread requires its own share of memory. [Puget Systems node benchmark webpage]

I gave Renderboss a try with their free trial link was removed because I’m a filthy newb

I set it to Dictator mode on a sample comp from the AE benchmark from Puget and…it crashed the OS and the PC restarted by itself. Wonderful.

This introduces another little issue:
Adobe removed the ability to save as h.264 within the built-in AE renderer forcing users to export via media encoder which doesn’t benefit from Rendering Applications multi-core enhancements

So you will have to export to a proxy format like GoPro Cineform but crank the quality to 4 and above.

With the GoPro Cineform Codec selected you can now export with a rendering application and enjoy enormous exports. None of this solves application performance issues.

My After Effects Preferences: pictures removed because I am a newbie

So in closing: This was my day off and I’ve spent all morning trying to make After Effects run quickly. If anyone has any idea on how to increase performance I’m willing to hear it.

[1v1mebro]

[1v1mebro]

Purging cache, benching, and purging cache it appears the performance increased in rudimentary comps for after effects but the system has yet to be tested against an actual work related comp. Will update with more

[1v1mebro]

Captain’s Log, date: October 7th 2019.

Purged Cache again and set Disk Cache Size to 150 GB on an intel 660p NVME drive. Changed settings to Cache Before Playback.

Created two projects using Element 3D with various levels of effects. So far this configuration is producing a stable and snappy experience.

More graphics intensive project will be created after this particular workload is finished.

What wasn’t tested: Text Effects, Patch Animation for Motion Graphics Work, Blur effects, Chroma Keying, Color Grading, Particles, general tomfoolery.

A sense of hope begins to appear. Caution must be exercised. Despair can reappear at any moment. Be vigilant.

[1v1mebro]

Opening one of my most intense project files: 100 Instagram Stories Template Pack and applying a Red Giant Universe background effect to a solid layer caused AE to become not responsive and playback could not achieve realtime playback

This is a bit of an absurd project with over 5 folders of hundreds of assets.

AE has crashed and thus my enthusiasm has vanished.

The original project file was from a Mac and the tutorial which accompanied this file shows the creator navigating and applying effects with no issue at all.

This is disheartening.

I’m losing to a normie.

[wendell]

What GPU you have? Ae crashyness sometimes is out of vram problems that aren’t handled well

[looming-hawk]

he has a 2080 listed in his O.P

[1v1mebro]

RTX 2080. It seems like I ran out of RAM and maxed out my Cache. That’s strange because of my pretty high end settings. Will expand now in a longer post

[wendell]

are you using the creator/studio driver or the game ready driver? if game ready ddu uninstall and switch to the other driver and retry the horrible project?

[1v1mebro]

Captain’s Log, date: October 7th 2019, Time: 9:14 EST.

A 1080 by 1080 comp with motion graphics assets loaded in from Toko Graphics Pack 3.0 (which is fantastic by the way) and audio tracks from Artlist.io (which is also fantastic).
[That link is my link from artlist]

First the project began to chug when I added a few assets [finished comp shown]

This project is only 1 minute long and 1080 by 1080. I presumed a PC of my stature should be able to tackle this workload without breaking a sweat but I had to restart after effects at least 3 times and purge cache once.

Key Information

Errors in the project file:

• Render would not complete with RenderBoss due to missing fonts
• Missing Font- BebasNeue-Book which could not be found online from font repositories. SOLUTION: I grabbed the Bebas Neue Book.ttf file from DaFont and threw it in a program called Birdfont. Birdfont allows you to manipulate .ttf files so I used it to change the font name to what after effects was looking for. Now this will also allow me to use the MOGRT files in Premiere for more speedy graphic creation.

Performance Issues:

• Render took quite a while in Adobe Media Encoder but I could not diagnose why
• After Effects needed to be closed several times, once becoming unresponsivej
• After Effects pushed my used RAM to over 100GB
• After Effects maxed out my cache folder which was set to 150GB (now set to 200GB)
• After Effects playback performance became unresponsive- dropping to a custom resolution of rendering every 10 pixels horizontally and vertically did not improve playback performance
• After Effects preview builds extremely slowly slowly on Third and Custom 10X10 but builds very fast in Full resolution.

Operator Issues

• I forgot to track CPU speed during renders
• ITBM isn’t enabled on this machine
• Despair and perplexion often create an overwhelming feeling of apathy
• Anger, sadness and frustration as to how a Mac can out perform my rig

Note to self:

• Monitor performance more closely when After Effects throws tantrums
• test if ITBM does anything
• will overclocking help at all?
• renderboss creates files extremely quickly, very nice addition to the workflow. I wonder how Rendergarden would do
• RenderBoss allows you to choose the output container but the default appears to be H.264 which is fine for this work

What if you are lost and don’t know that you are lost? What if the performance I’m after is not attainable?

** Specs **

RAM: CORSAIR Vengeance RGB Pro 128GB (8 x 16GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3000 (PC4 24000) Desktop Memory Model CMW128GX4M8C3000C16W

• DDR4 3000 (PC4 24000)
• Timing 16-18-18-36
• CAS Latency 16
• Voltage 1.35V

(info from Newegg)

So, in conclusion … I must fight on.

[1v1mebro]

I am using the game ready driver, I was unaware of the creator driver!

The GPU didn’t seem to be taxed at all during these tests but I will take note of GPU utilization tomorrow during round 2

[wendell]

It’s not always easy to tell. for example with red giant plugins it just allocates some amount of vram equal to 32 bits times frame size times number of layers. Which can really quickly exhaust vram. And it doesn’t always catch that.

Quadros can do compression which also helps a ton with those kinds of issues.

[1v1mebro]

Creator Driver installed, ready to test tomorrow. Will update with more information. Eager to see if this increases performance.

One thing that has me confused is why would performance increase suddenly when rendering Full resolution in the preview window vs quarter & Custom -render every 10 pixels horizontally and vertically.

If performance degradation was linked to GPU consumption wouldn’t that be alleviated with a lower render quality in the render preview area?

[wendell]

It depends… is it possible to download and examine the project? If the out of memory is handled properly some plugins handle that gracefully internally. Other times a plugin or codec will generate some temporary files in the background so its slow till that finishes. thats a bit of a stretch because it seems like you are trying to control for that though

[1v1mebro]

It is, however since I’m using base elements from Toko Graphics Kit and Motion Bro those plugins and assets are required. I’m diving back into this rabbit hole now. Soon I will have more data. Perhaps a cleaner Comp would produce better results, however I will first try to work with the problematic project to see if the Creator Driver has alleviated any of the issues.

[1v1mebro]

Update: Will have to wait for tomorrow. Moving offices has momentarily derailed progress into this investigation.

[1v1mebro]

Captain’s Log, Date: October 7th 2019, Time: Hammer…EST.

I found myself with a shovel and so I dug.

Digging into the settings of AE there were a few levers inside the File> Project Settings which brings up a separate menu to dial in some parameters for your project.

Here I set Mercury GPU Acceleration (CUDA) to on, changed the Expressions option to Javascript and re-launched the Puget Systems Benchmark.

Previously the Expressions tab had the option set to Legacy ExtendScript due to the Motion Bro Extension asking for that specifically.

Not sure if that was throwing up compatibility issues with my other extensions.

These results are encouraging, however it doesn’t come close to the 9900K + RTX 2080 setup which Puget Systems measures all scores against.

I’ve performed some rudimentary tracking today only to discover something completely horrifying:

• I’ve forgotten how to use the 3D tracker and Mocha.

Those tests will need to wait for another day of pure tutorial re-learning.

After playing around with Mocha I’ve noticed the tracker performs moderately rapidly but not as fast as some other YouTubers out there.

Red Giant King Pin Tracker from their VFX Suite really spoils the user with it’s dead simple tracking capabilities. It really is a treat to use. If it is on sale and you need these kinds of plugins I highly recommend the VFX Suite.

This entire deep dive thread is intended to excavate and eliminate performance issues with detailed, in depth comps for my workflow. Everyone’s workflow may vary.

Just for fun

I decided to use the free Saber plugin from Video Copilot and threw in a vectorized layer of the Level 1 Logo.

Previewing this effect was far from realtime in the preview window, but that is to be expected since there is a lot going on in this effect.

I am happy to report that now, for some reason, the scaling options within the preview window have begun to function again!

A Replica of the problematic project can be found here:

problematicAEcomp.7z

Required Extensions: MotionBro, Toko Graphics Pack (envato)

[can I post those links here?]

OK. Next up: a real VFX project.

Finally starting real work at close to 7PM on a Thursday. What a week.

[1v1mebro]

The other day I met the legend Andrew Cramer from videocopilot.net at a conference. We discussed performance issues with rendering engines and after effects. We arrived at a shared conclusion: diagnosing these issues is difficult, tedious and for some reason satisfying when you fix it.

Also one takeaway is don’t buck the trend. Difficult to hear for sure since I do love digging through spec sheets and being clever with my configurations.

However, there is something to be said for ease of use and support availability for widely adopted integrations/software stacks.

With Maxon cinema 4D being integrated into after effects and illustrator it makes 3D easy to throw around and use in mixed media applications for a client or end user. Throw on redshift being bought by Maxon and there is little reason to use Octane. (this sparked a long exasperated declaration of frustration from my attempts of working with octane in the past).

In the end: what gets you to shippable end products faster?

Although not a performance monster in AE, this current rig is well rounded to handle most tasks in my workflow.

Workflows change.

This is the reason I wanted high core count and the most RAM I could Chuck into a box. I know that in my work I need to photo edit in Photoshop/Lightroom and edit in premiere/resolve while compositing in after effects, design graphics in illustrator, create proposals in InDesign and light 3D work in blender/element 3D/cinema 4D.

There are plenty of optimizations which can be applied since this is my first year with this machine and this mixed media workflow.

While frustrating that there are very few step by step guides that show how to “unlock the potential” of your configuration in this software stack, it is fun to dig and discover gems while mining the mixed media caverns.

The road less traveled is fun especially if you have the ability to log the journey on a forum