mm,

It's what i've found as well, that for character animation it can often be better to turn MP off while previewing short areas. It would be fantastic if MP could start without the long overhead, so it gives more benefit when working with short previews. I am interested to know the answer to mm's question, can this be improved by an update of the application? Until then, I often reduce the preview sample resolution to half or third and turn MP off. I did not know that there was supposed to be an overhead when starting MP, I just thought it was my system or amount of RAM. This now tells me that my plan to build a new computer with lot's of cores may actually not benefit much for RAM previews then, for character type animations.

Walter, if rendering to for example QuickTime rather than as an image sequence, is MP being used then when rendering in the render queue, or does it only use MP on image sequences?

Thanks

Anders Sundstedt | Sundstedt Animation

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To: AE-List@media-motion.tv
Date: Fri, 8 Nov 2013 00:17:01 -0800
From: murphy@lasercade.com
Subject: Re: [AE] Multiprocessing and RAM previews?

Thanks for your replies...

Ok, so it seems that for the work I do, and the way I work, muliprocessing in AE is not the way to go ( I do a lot of character animation where i'm constantly previewing 5-10 second areas). 

Musings:

My rough understanding of MP in AE is that it's basically launching instances of itself, and so has to save the file, launch these processes and then distribute the data to these copies. Thus the long delay before rendering can start. Is this process just a function of AE's legacy as a program that was created waaay before multiprocessing in desktops or is this just the nature of the beast? It seems like this isn't the case with other multiprocessor enabled apps I've used (3ds Max, Maya)? Is there any way to improve/change this short of a core rewrite of the application (which I don't see happening!)?

mm

On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 10:42 PM, Walter Soyka <walter@keenlive.com> wrote:

On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 10:38 PM, Michael Murphy <murphy@lasercade.com> wrote:

So my question is, has everyone else had a similar experience? I haven't seen anyone mention it on the list, so I've always thought It might be a anomaly with my configuration, but I have a new computer now, running Win 8.1 pro 64bit and it's the same situation as my 2012 macbook pro and older systems.

You're not seeing an anomaly. There's noticeable overhead to start the background processes, and while that may make sense for a long final render, it doesn't always pay for shorter previews.

After Effects CC has a new preference that allows you to keep multiprocessing on for the render queue, but turn it off for RAM preview. 

Walter Soyka  |  Keen Live

Email walter@keenlive.com