It’s going to render three or four times faster. What we found in our testing, and what’s out there now with real world Beta testing, and internally on high-end machines, is that we’re looking at 3x, maybe 4x faster renders on complicated projects. So could we look at both of those scenarios?Īnd so we started heading down the GPU route and we started porting effects and transforms and blending modes, and we also started looking at what it would look like if we could get multiple frames rendering concurrently.
There was this whole discussion on that side and then there was a whole discussion about OK, well, we don’t use a lot of CPU threads, and that’s probably leaving a significant amount of performance on the table. Is there a solution for a 30,000 by 30,000 pixel composition on a GPU? What would it take? Do we have the resources? SEAN: A couple of years ago we took a step back and said, OK, if we’re going to think about rendering performance, then what do we focus on? Do we invest many, many man years to get After Effects working fully on the GPU? And if we did, what’s the negative consequences of doing that? You know, what happens to text? What happens to the scale of compositions? Because there’s only so much VRAM going around. What can you tell us about the new multi-frame rendering feature? So let’s pick up our interview where we left off…ĬHRIS: So probably the question you’ve been waiting to be asked. The past 18 months of work by the After Effects Performance Team has laid the groundwork for a whole range of new features… AE users worldwide are starting to notice! There’s no-one better to take us through “Multi-Frame Rendering” than Sean Jenkin, head of the “Performance” team at Adobe. What this means for After Effects users is that “Multi-Frame Rendering” may be the newest feature to grab headlines, but it’s only the first in a whole range of new features that are all aimed at improving performance. But what’s even more significant is that the work done to enable “Multi-Frame Rendering” has laid the foundation for all sorts of future performance enhancements. While “Multi-Frame Rendering” may sound like it’s the same thing, the underlying technical implementation is totally new. As I detailed in Part 8, RMFS never worked properly for me, and I was glad when Adobe removed the feature from version 13.5. In practice RMFS was unpredictable, unstable, and could easily result in renders that were slower than if it was turned off. If the project was large this could take a long time, and having multiple copies of the After Effects application in memory was a waste of RAM which could have been used for rendering. Each version of After Effects running in the background needed to load up its own copy of the project. RMFS was basically running several copies of After Effects on the same machine, with each background version rendering individual frames.įor some projects, on suitable hardware, this could be very effective – but the technical implementation was relatively crude. The older RMFS feature was analysed in-depth in part 8 of this series, but the short version is that it was something of a clever hack. At first, this might sound very similar to the old (and deprecated) feature that was known as “Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously”.
Multi-Frame Rendering, by itself, is a new feature that allows After Effects to utilize multiple CPU cores to render more than one frame, simultaneously.
While the official announcement was specifically about Beta-testing “Multi-Frame Rendering”, there’s a lot more to it than just faster renders. A few months ago, Adobe announced something that After Effects users have been waiting many years for: the ability for After Effects to more effectively utilize multi-core CPUs. Faster renders for free!īut now it’s time to get serious.
If you have a Creative Cloud subscription, you can download the Beta right now and try it out. Multi-Frame Rendering was released for Beta testing in March this year. We began our chat by looking at the topic of “Performance” in general, and what Adobe’s been doing to bring After Effects up to speed. If you missed part 1, then it makes sense to take a few minutes and catch up. Sean, a Senior Engineering Manager for Adobe, sat down for a comprehensive interview about all things “performance”, and it was so comprehensive I had to split it across two articles.
The most fitting end possible for this series on “ After Effects and Performance” is an interview with Sean Jenkin, who heads up the “Performance” team for After Effects, at Adobe’s HQ in Seattle.