Hi folks! A quick update to let you know that three new Multi-Frame Rendering features went live in the After Effects public beta (18.4×37 and later) earlier this week:

• Speculative Preview: When AE is idle (you’re checking your email, grabbing a coffee or even just browsing effects), it will render your timeline in the background so you’re ready to preview when you get back.

• Multi-Frame Rendering in Adobe Media Encoder Beta: Enable MFR in the AE Beta and export in the background up to 3x faster.

• Render notifications on desktop, iOS and Android: AE can let you know when it’s done no matter where you are via the Creative Cloud app. (Fun bonus: notifications will even work on your smartwatch!)

Here’s a link with more info on each feature:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-beta/multi-frame-rendering-is-here-aka-the-multithreading-you-ve-been-asking-for/m-p/12131175#M925

Let us know how things are working for you on the beta forums. And stay tuned for more Multi-Frame Rendering in more places!

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

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.