Now imagine running 15 After Effects instances, each requiring at least 16 GB RAM. Adobe’s minimum requirement is to have a 16 GM RAM. In this case 15 After Effects simultaneously rendering at the same time. And so if you have for example an 8 core – 16 CPU-thread Ryzen, it is safe to say, that you can open N – 1 instance. This works quite well if you have a multithread CPU and you want to maximize CPU utilization.Įach instance will use one CPU-thread. The second and more complex method is to open multiple After Effects instances. Speed up rendering by opening 2 and more after effects projects One for caching and the other for rendering. And lastly, throw in multiple fast SSD hard drives with the NVME interface. The cheaper, more cost-efficient option would be to go with a PC build and get a Ryzen processor with as many cores as possible.Īdditionally include at least 32 GB to 64 GB of RAM to fully take advantage of the CPU.
I would say every wannabe video producing professional will get an iMac Pro or Mac Pro just for the show, regardless of its hefty price tag.Īlthough it doesn’t change the fact, that iMac Pro or Mac Pro are the beast and will be the fastest option available if your production flow uses the Mac OS ecosystem. If you have a lot of cash to burn, buy a new Mac Pro. The first and most obvious method is to buy a new computer built with rendering in mind. So what can we do about it to speed up our rendering process?
But as I explained above, neither calculation is simple nor software is optimized.
GPUs are great for parallel simple float calculations and require the software to be optimized to use it to its full capacity. But then they removed it due to unknown reasons. In the past, they supported OpenGL standard and some certified graphic cards with Ray Tracing technology. There is a general knowledge, that After Effects relies on CPU and RAM instead of GPU for rendering. After Effects has no way to know the current position of the object beforehand.Īnd if it does, the pre-rendering process of calculating preliminary variables would take the same time, if not more. The white trail would have to be rendered frame by frame depending on the actual position of the Superman. Or imagine you have a scene with Superman flying in the sky and you want to add some effects, that would display how fast he is flying, like a white trail. Like for example a position of a light particle depending on the dynamic variables in the scene like the sun. In essence, behind every video effect is a simple math formula, that computes something. If we dig deeper into how rendering video effects work, we realize, that using parallel processing is very hard. Still, it doesn’t answer the question of why After Effects cannot utilize multiple cores properly. So it makes a total sense from Adobe’s perspective to make the choice for you and to protect you from their faulty feature. And your render won’t crash because of it. And you just pray that you didn’t make any mistake in your composition. Imagine having a deadline, that is getting closer and closer. All the time, energy, and rendered footage wasted. I don’t know about you, but I would be pissed, if my render, that already took 78 hours, crashed. The official reason is that using multiple cores messed up with the rendering process. But then they changed their mind and completely removed this feature. However to give Adobe a credit, After Effects allowed using multi-core processing at one time in the past. I would think, that using multiple cores or CPU threads is a no brainer nowadays.