how can I increase my rendering speed in AE CS5???

[Nicholas Natteau]

Trying to figure out how I can speed up my rendering time animating a large scale globe (using CC Sphere) map of Earth that I am working on in AE CS5. The map was created in Illustrator CS5 at 1917x959, but of course I have to increase the map's size 5x to 9585x4795 to avoid the image becoming blurry when I zoom in on the globe.

Naturally at this size (9585x4795) every change I make takes ages to see. Setting my resolution to "quarter" helps (as does turning on "Open GL") but not nearly enough.

Are there any adjustments I can make in AE Preferences to speed up rendering time? If not, am I better off upgrading my 2007 Mac Pro desktop (2 x 2.8 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon) with 8GB 800 Mhz DDR FB-DIMM memory) to a top of the line 2011 mac pro desktop. Would that greatly increase my rendering speed? I'm also currently using an ATI Radeon HT 4870 graphics card.

Just trying to figure what I can do to speed up my workflow on this project.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

 

[handsome pete]

PM me your email address and I can send you that sample project to help you out.


As for boosting performance in AE, there are many different ways to adjust. A better machine will always help, but not as much as you think. It's more about how you structure your projects and know what kind of things will tax your system. Work with precomps and be organized with your layers. Adjust in/out points. Make sure layers don't span your entire timeline if they're not being seen. Work in lower resolutions. Turn off effects/layers if you're not working with them directly. Learn what effects take more processing power (do you really need "lens blur" when "gaussian" will suffice?). If you're working with tons of precomps/layers, see if anything can be rendered out on its own and brought back in to work with. Look into working with proxies.

This list could go on. Far too many people jump into software like this and when it doesn't work as expected they think only the biggest and fasted machine out there will solve the problem. More often than not it's just a matter of getting to know the software itself, how it works, and how to work the most efficiently in it.

 

[Nicholas Natteau]

Hi Pete,

Thanks very much for taking the time to write all of this. It really helps me (and I;m sure anyone else who may be reading this post) gain a better understanding of how to improve work speed in AE. My map of course has many layers. It has a total of 86, but I was able to delete at least 20. However the others must be kept. Not using any gaussian blurs though and I'm working in half or quarter res. What proxies would you suggest that could help speed up rendering time???

 

[Renee]

Have you considered rendering out your globe- finishing whatever animation you need to do on it- and using that to work with instead of CC Sphere? Pete mentioned it above. Even if you render of the sphere is not perfect, importing a render will be much faster than CC Sphere, and you could always tweak a CC Sphere to fit your final comp later.

 

[oneinfiniteloop]

I'm going to tell you right now that 9585x4795 is way too big for whatever you're doing. Most pro's don't even make things that big when they can get around it. With something that big it's just going to choke the render, period. What resolution you work in doesn't affect render times. You need to make your map smaller and find some way around the zooming part. Some things you can do…

Do you really need CC Sphere? You lose the ability to continuously rasterize your vector file. If you're just zooming into one part you'll be focused in one part and you can fake the rotation and lighting in other ways rather than use CC Sphere. You can use it in your wide, but do a fast zoom and in the middle of the zoom you can transition into the close up AI file that you throw some bulge on and some lighting via Illustrator or AE (using 3d layers and lights or faked via 2D and solids feathered out, etc). Turn on motion blur to hide the loss in resolution as your get closer to your 1917x959 vector map.

You can pre-render elements as others have mentioned, but pre-rendering a 9.5k element is going to take a ton of time anyways. There's also multiprocessing but you don't have enough RAM to really take advantage of that. Adobe recommends 2 GB per core so you're right at the threshold without any left over for the OS, programs, etc. I have 18GB of RAM in my machine and I don't set it to use all 8 processors, usually only 4. Even then it's faster to render without it on.

Other things you can do is to fake the whole CC Sphere effect in 2D in Illustrator, but if you're using the rotation aspect of it that doesn't help much since you can't rotate the same way with a 2d layer. Using a 3D program is a good way too, but you'd have to have access and knowledge of a 3D program.

The general idea is cheat, cheat, cheat and keep it optimized. Having elements at 9000 pixels wide is, for the most part, unnecessary and just adds a bunch of extra overhead with very little benefit.

 

[handsome pete]

I'm going to tell you right now that 9585x4795 is way too big for whatever you're doing.

A composition with a resolution that size is easy to work with as long as it's used as a placeholder. I wasn't suggesting making a full size map that large, animating it, then rendering it out. Your right in that would take up a lot of resources and be difficult to work with.

The sample project I provided him also used a very large comp, but that was merely to reflect proper mapping onto the CCSphere. Most of the comp was blank space, and by turning other layers off at the proper times over the duration of the animation, then performance and render times would not be affected substantially.