Kevin McCurdy

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Full program multi-threaded support

1,006 votes

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451 comments · After Effects » Performance · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →
Under Review · AdminVictoria Nece (Sr. Product Manager, Motion Graphics and VFX, Adobe DVA) responded
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.
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…
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Kevin McCurdy commented · Aug 21, 2018

For output rendering, I know of a plugin that can take advantage of multiple cores. https://www.mekajiki.com/rendergarden/

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Convert Expression to Keyframes freeze

2 votes

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0 comments · After Effects » Stability · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →

Kevin McCurdy shared this idea · Jul 7, 2018
Add option for J K hotkeys to work with only selected layer(s)

85 votes

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4 comments · After Effects · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →

Kevin McCurdy supported this idea · Jul 7, 2018
Add back rendering support for H264 codec directly out of AE

253 votes

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51 comments · After Effects » General · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →

Kevin McCurdy supported this idea · Jul 7, 2018
Remove pitch change when using shuttle

22 votes

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5 comments · Audition » Multitrack Editor · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →

Under Review · AdminDurin G (Adobe) (Product Manager, Adobe Audio, Adobe DVA) responded

Feature request submitted for scrubbing without pitch change, a la Premiere-style scrubbing, as well as options for default playback speed.

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Kevin McCurdy commented · Jun 3, 2018

While we're at it, It'd be useful to have lower increments of shuttle speed available. Like in Premiere, where shift+J/L gives 10% increments.

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Can we not just finally have custom zoom sizes in the viewer?

19 votes

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2 comments · After Effects · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →

Kevin McCurdy supported this idea · May 16, 2018
copy paste keyframes of multiple layers at the same time

48 votes

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4 comments · After Effects » User experience/interface · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →

Kevin McCurdy supported this idea · May 16, 2018
BACKGROUND AUTO-SAVE, Auto-save should not interrupt your workflow

295 votes

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20 comments · After Effects · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →

Kevin McCurdy supported this idea · May 16, 2018
String Expression Control

29 votes

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0 comments · After Effects » User experience/interface · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →

Kevin McCurdy supported this idea · May 16, 2018
Cel Animation Workflow

140 votes

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6 comments · After Effects » Animation · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →

Kevin McCurdy supported this idea · May 16, 2018
First you should make it compatible once again with the 32 Bit plugins, and also make it compatible with Slates plugins, like VMR and the VM

6 votes

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7 comments · Audition · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →

Kevin McCurdy supported this idea · May 3, 2018
Lighting options in Glass Wipe transition

3 votes

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0 comments · After Effects » Compositing & effects · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →

Kevin McCurdy shared this idea · May 3, 2018
Choose anti-aliasing options

4 votes

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3 comments · Character Animator » Recording · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →

Kevin McCurdy supported this idea · Apr 15, 2018
Media encoder panel in AE and Premiere

29 votes

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1 comment · Cross-Application Workflows » Shared render queue · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →

Kevin McCurdy supported this idea · Apr 15, 2018
Bug - Master Properties and toComp() expression

2 votes

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1 comment · After Effects » Compositing & effects · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →
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Kevin McCurdy commented · Apr 11, 2018

MP's also don't seem to affect 3D-enabled effects like CC Cylinder.

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Kevin McCurdy shared this idea · Apr 9, 2018
Control timeline properties from the effects panel - Effects panel to Properties panel

298 votes

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17 comments · After Effects » Animation · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →

Kevin McCurdy supported this idea · Apr 10, 2018
Potential workaround for two issues with Master Properties

4 votes

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0 comments · After Effects » Animation · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →

Kevin McCurdy shared this idea · Apr 10, 2018
April 2018 15.1 AE CC Quicktime PNG compression; bring it back!

18 votes

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0 comments · After Effects » Animation · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →

Kevin McCurdy supported this idea · Apr 10, 2018
Memory use in Multitrack playback does not respect limits set in Preferences

2 votes

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0 comments · Audition » Performance · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →

Kevin McCurdy shared this idea · Apr 9, 2018
Spectral Waveform Amplitude Visualization Adjustment

6 votes

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2 comments · Audition » Workflow & Interoperability · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Delete… · Admin →
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Kevin McCurdy commented · Apr 9, 2018

In the "Spectral Displays" section of Preferences, set the "Decibel Range" for the Frequency display higher.

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Kevin McCurdy

My feedback

Full program multi-threaded support

Convert Expression to Keyframes freeze

Add option for J K hotkeys to work with only selected layer(s)

Add back rendering support for H264 codec directly out of AE

Remove pitch change when using shuttle

Can we not just finally have custom zoom sizes in the viewer?

copy paste keyframes of multiple layers at the same time

BACKGROUND AUTO-SAVE, Auto-save should not interrupt your workflow

String Expression Control

Cel Animation Workflow

First you should make it compatible once again with the 32 Bit plugins, and also make it compatible with Slates plugins, like VMR and the VM

Lighting options in Glass Wipe transition

Choose anti-aliasing options

Media encoder panel in AE and Premiere

Bug - Master Properties and toComp() expression

Control timeline properties from the effects panel - Effects panel to Properties panel

Potential workaround for two issues with Master Properties

April 2018 15.1 AE CC Quicktime PNG compression; bring it back!

Memory use in Multitrack playback does not respect limits set in Preferences

Spectral Waveform Amplitude Visualization Adjustment

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