Ideal system for intensive After Effects?

[Maverick2002]

We've got a pretty good 3D render farm set up at work, but we're having time issues with large After Effects edits. Some of our 5+ minute clips take up to 2 hours to render out. We tried doing the AE Watch Folder "distributed rendering" but it hasn't saved us any time in the long run because of the audio compiling limitation.

So .. we're thinking of putting together or altering one of our racks for the sole purpose of After Effects. Does anyone know what resources AE requires most? I'm sure it's not the same as max which is all CPU power ...

TIA

 

[Maverick2002]

bump .. looks like there's no info on this anyhwhere

 

[Maverick2002]

and another bump ..

 

[videogames101]

no idea

 

[angriezt]

AE Render seems to be based on three things, CPU, RAM, and GPU. If you have a multi-core system doing the rendering for AE you could look into Gridironsoftware.com's Nucleo Pro. Which when properly configured allows AE to properly distribute processing across the cores of the system.

As for your GPU not sure what is in your Rig but even consumer grade gfx cards can boost performance IE nVidia 9600GT etc. I have sold quite a few dual purpose Video/Audio Post production machines to clients recently, who have been in this type of setup. Most have been blown away by what Nucleo paired with a nice system can do.

 

[iBPJohn]

Can you list your current specs?

 

[Maverick2002]

I've ran AE tests on a couple machines here. It's a ~75mb compressed 6 minute video clip with lots of effects and with source files pulled through a local gigabit network. Here are the specs and my results:

PC:
1x Q6600 (quad core) @ 2.4
4GB DDR2 PC2-6400
Seagate 500GB 7200.11 32mb cache
GeForce 8600GT

Render time: ~1hr 15minutes

Rack:
2x Xeon E5420 (quad core) @ 2.5
4GB DDR2 (not sure of speed, probably PC2-6400)
Seagate 500GB 7200.11 32mb cache
crappy video

Render time: ~50 minutes

So, a nice size difference with the only other difference being more CPU power, possibly faster ram. The video card is much worse, but I'm only talking about RENDERING THE COMPLETED VIDEO .... we have separate machines for the actual editing.

I think that's confusing some people. I only care about resource allocation of After Effects while writing out a WMV/MOV/whatever, not the actual editing process.

So, can anyone elaborate further?

I'm basically trying to put together a system that will be ideal for quick AE rendering once all the editing is done on a different machine.

TIA

EDIT: downloaded a trial of Nucleo Pro and will run some tests with it shortly - we definitely have a lot of cores.

 

[heyheybooboo]

Originally posted by: Maverick2002
I've ran AE tests on a couple machines here. It's a ~75mb compressed 6 minute video clip with lots of effects and with source files pulled through a local gigabit network.

I don't know what the latency is across your network but it would be tough to top 4ms read/write Raptor hard drives ... Start pinging and see just how much that network latency is slowing you down. Increasing the packet size will improve performance but may otherwise bog down your network. It would be worth paying a pro to optimize if you do not have the inhouse capability.

Are you using a 64-bit OS?

My adobe stuff likes three hard drives and as much ram as I can throw at it.

1st HDD: OS
2nd HDD: Data Source (read)
3rd HDD: Final Output (write)

I think AE may recommend up to 4 hard drives. You can set up a paging file on an independent disk.

 

[Maverick2002]

I'll try doing that as well. Does running drives in RAID (0+1) have any impact on rendering performance?

Also, does anyone have any resource they can point me to which shows what resources AE demands at render time? Or does that not exist?

 

[wwswimming]

http://forums.cgsociety.org/forumdisplay.php?f=10

that's the AE forum at CGSociety. probably a lot of people there
having to deal with similar constraints.