Full program multi-threaded support

After Effects would benefit greatly from being able to actually utilize all cores when rendering, rather than having to rely on a third party solution, like the excellent program Render Garden by Mekajiki.

Screen Shot 2020-11-25 at 12.14.21 pm.png 654 KB

1,137 votes

Anonymous shared this idea · April 03, 2018 · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →

In Progress ·

AdminVictoria Nece (Sr. Product Manager, Motion Graphics and VFX, Adobe DVA) responded · March 10, 2021

Multi-Frame Rendering is now available in After Effects public beta. We’re starting with Render Queue export, and will add support for preview, AME, MOGRTs and beyond in subsequent releases.

This is a significant update to the After Effects architecture. Unlike older versions that rendered multiple frames by creating copies of the application, this is true multithreaded rendering. The render pipeline has been optimized from end to end, enabling After Effects to use your system to its full potential.

We know how important rendering faster is to you. That’s why we’ve taken the time to do this right, and build a strong, high-performance foundation for the future. We appreciate your patience, and would love to hear how Multi-Frame Rendering is working on your hardware and with your projects.

You can learn more about this multi-year effort here: https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2021/03/10/multi-frame-rendering-now-in-after-effects-beta.html

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Under Review ·

AdminVictoria Nece (Sr. Product Manager, Motion Graphics and VFX, Adobe DVA) responded · August 15, 2019

Hello everybody!

(This post was co-authored by Tim Kurkoski (After Effects Product Owner), Andrew Cheyne (After Effects Engineering Manager), and Victoria Nece (After Effects Product Manager).)

This thread has been sitting here for quite a while without a response. To start, we want to apologize for that. We haven’t been ignoring you or your feedback – this is just a particularly complex topic. That said, it’s time for us to check in with you, clarify a few things, and give you an idea of what we’re looking at for the future of After Effects, especially when it comes to performance.

To start, we fully understand that you want After Effects to be as fast as it can be – utilizing your computer’s hardware resources to render as fast as possible. Over the last several years, we have been working on the performance of After Effects constantly. Sometimes those performance gains are obvious, like GPU rendering or improving an individual effect’s use of the CPU. Sometimes it’s less obvious, like making expressions evaluate faster via a modern JavaScript engine.

Before jumping into the specific request here (multi-threading AE), we should talk about how the AE team looks at performance in general. There are three areas:

Rendering Performance: How fast can AE get pixels onto your screen?

Interactive Performance: How fast does the UI respond to your actions?

Workflow Performance: How fast can you complete a task in AE?

All three are important. All three impact how quickly you can make creative decisions and get your work done. This request and this discussion are focused on the first area, rendering, so we will focus on that, however we don’t want to lose sight of the bigger picture.

Rendering Performance

What have as the AE Team been doing? When we set out to tackle rendering performance, we looked at the potential improvement offered by different technical paths. And we set a high bar: we didn’t want to just have an incremental speed increase. We wanted a major leap forward in rendering power.

The obvious technology that would enable us to achieve that goal was leveraging the GPU. Because GPU processing power has leapfrogged the CPU — and is explicitly designed to handle this type of processing — the decision was made to invest in getting AE’s core rendering pipeline running on the GPU.

This is not a small task, and we’re not done yet. The most visible result of this effort has been the porting of individual effects to the GPU – more than 40 so far. Less visible is the work we’ve done getting the rest of the After Effects rendering pipeline on the GPU, such as layer transforms and motion blur or debayering RED raw R3D footage.

We still have further to go, as the real power of the GPU is unlocked when you don’t have to send a frame back and forth between CPU and GPU for different stages of rendering. As more links of the GPU chain come online, you can expect further rendering performance gains.

Multi-Threading

We do know what you’re thinking at this point. You want to know what we’re doing about multi-threading.

We all recognize that After Effects would benefit from additional general-purpose multi-threaded rendering. And while we can’t get into specifics here or make any promises about our future roadmap (that’s all confidential when you’re a publicly traded company), we are actively working on multi-threaded CPU rendering.

Ultimately, when it comes to achieving the best rendering speeds possible for AE, we know we’ll need a combination of GPU and CPU processing that maxes out all the resources on your machine.

We recently partnered with the folks at School of Motion and they did a fantastic video on how to get a more optimized system for After Effects: https://www.schoolofmotion.com/tutorials/after-effects-computer

Please keep posting and letting us know what you think. We’ll continue to watch this thread (and all the others on UserVoice). And we appreciate your patience with our response to this post.

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Rafael Lewis commented · March 18, 2021 13:49 · Flag as inappropriate

@Patrick - Ahh, gotcha. That is strange...

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Patrick Proier commented · March 16, 2021 23:27 · Flag as inappropriate

@Rafael Lewis
I know! but rendering in Media Encoder (CPU workload 10-30%) is on my 24 core system still faster than rendering in AE with MFR (CPU workload 100%)...(i testen this with the MFR test project from Adobe) ...thats really strange

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Rafael Lewis commented · March 16, 2021 16:22 · Flag as inappropriate

WARNING

Downloaded the beta, it auto-updated my media encoder, and now I can't send projects from AE 2019 to AME because the correct versions was erased. It's not available for download either, so I'm totally Fked.

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Rafael Lewis commented · March 16, 2021 15:37 · Flag as inappropriate

@PatrickProier - Multicore hasn't been implemented in media encoder yet, so you won't see a difference.

"Multi-Frame Rendering is now available in After Effects public beta. We’re starting with Render Queue export, and will add support for preview, AME, MOGRTs and beyond in subsequent releases."

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Joe Clay commented · March 16, 2021 13:51 · Flag as inappropriate

Thanks Antoine. I hadn't seen the list. I wouldn't say almost all of them got ported. I mean Curves and Levels aren't. Neither is Lumetri which was borrowed from Premiere. I think maybe 2 effects on the project I tested with were MFR compatible. I'll continue to wait as always, haha.

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Antoine Autokroma commented · March 16, 2021 13:44 · Flag as inappropriate

Joe the list of native effects available in MFR is here https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/user-guide.html/after-effects/using/effect-list.ug.html

Almost all of them got ported. 3rd party plugins will come after a few months. Just wait a bit :)

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Joe Clay commented · March 16, 2021 13:40 · Flag as inappropriate

Tried this out. With the project we tried across three computers we ran about the exact same times. It turns out hardly any of the effects are optimized for multicore rendering—including things like Invert, Levels, Hue/Sat, etc. So if you're using any plugins, you might not notice any improvements. I get that it's beta, but what is there to test?

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Patrick Proier commented · March 16, 2021 08:05 · Flag as inappropriate

@ David Jackson
My 24cores run also at 100% with MFR and are around 3x faster than the old AE intern rendered but after all the project was rendered even ä faster via Media Encoder where the CPU never went over 35% ...please compare your project also in Media Encoder

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David Jackson commented · March 16, 2021 07:57 · Flag as inappropriate

Update: Whilst it flew through 66% it crashed mid way, and got stuck. Only notices after I came back after 20 minutes and it was all stuck at the same time and progress, and the cores were all empty of activity. :(

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David Jackson commented · March 16, 2021 06:38 · Flag as inappropriate

As someone who is currently working on a pretty big project atm. Native artwork is 4000px x 4000px, then downscaled to different resolutions. AE standard latest release takes 80Minutes per 15 second export. It's pretty hefty. This morning I ran the same export though the BETA with multi frame. SO AMAZING to see every core on my 16 core 192gb ram Mac Pro 7,1 finally work. Still rendering, but I see a huge improvement here.

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Rafael Lewis commented · March 15, 2021 11:04 · Flag as inappropriate

I did a test with a project I'm working on and it went from a render time of 2:26 to 1:43. So around 29.5% faster render time.

Pretty cool! Not really applicable to my workflow yet, since it's only implemented in the render queue, but I'm looking forward to further implementation, especially previews, since that's when I really need to see what I'm doing.

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10700K CPU @ 4.7GHz
Emphasized clock speed over core count because of AE. -_-

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Patrick Proier commented · March 11, 2021 16:02 · Flag as inappropriate

@ Antoine ...try the from Adobe provided AE Test-Project

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Antoine Autokroma commented · March 11, 2021 14:03 · Flag as inappropriate

Patrick Proier Interesting... My basic test of exporting without any effect shows that MFR is slower. But I should test with a big project, not a blank one

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Antoine Autokroma commented · March 11, 2021 14:02 · Flag as inappropriate

Or maybe it means 3rd party renderer will get even faster ;)

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Joshua Rutter commented · March 11, 2021 13:57 · Flag as inappropriate

Woah...don't have to go 3rd party anymore?? ;)

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Patrick Proier commented · March 10, 2021 18:23 · Flag as inappropriate

@ Antoine: Yes! ...you see that the my CPU went never over 30% in Media Encoder (mostly around 15%) ... and i tried it also with AE2021 + Media Encoder which has no Multiframe support - same result.

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Antoine Autokroma commented · March 10, 2021 17:54 · Flag as inappropriate

Patrick, if you disable MFR, do you still get good rendering performance in Adobe Media Encoder ?

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Patrick Proier commented · March 10, 2021 17:44 · Flag as inappropriate

Ohhh thats music in my ears!

But i think there is still much to improve because my benchmark-scene tests are not that good:
(AMD 3960X (24Cores), 64 GB RAM, RTX 3090)

Multiframe: 4:30 (CPU = 100% , GPU after the first 1/3 at 0%)
Singleframe: 12:00 (CPU = between 5-22%)
Media Encoder: 4:15 (CPU=10-30%, GPU at the beginn 10-40% after the first 1/3 at 0%)

i think if this project would be GPU optimised it would be even faster in Media Encoder?.

Conclusion:
Im sooo glade that you realy work on Multicore support! but at the moment i see no real benefit over rendering in Media Encoder - but that could change if you optimise the Mutiframe Rendering, implement Multiframe Preview and make all your Effects Multiframe and GPU compatible!

PS: Please don't forget to work also on a totally new and modern realtime 3D Engine for AE! We really need support of polygon 3D object (obj. fbx. abc), pointclouds (.vdb), raytracing (light,shadow, reflection, AO), PBR-materials and some simple tools to do deformations or 3D camera projections directly in AE.

Merci!

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Truck T commented · March 10, 2021 15:58 · Flag as inappropriate

I am straight up in utter disbelief this is actually, finally happening.

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Truck T commented · March 10, 2021 15:57 · Flag as inappropriate

I am straight up in utter disbelief this is actually happening.

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