From: Chris Zwar <chris@chriszwar.com>
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Subject: Sluggish performance with many nulls and lights
Message-Id: <C6C76BE2-72AC-4DC0-B156-21AFF2A490B6@chriszwar.com>
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2013 22:17:07 +1100
To: After Effects email list Mail List <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
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Had a really slow tedious day today and am looking for suggestions.  =
After Effects (CS6) just gets really sluggish and unresponsive when =
working with big projects.  Sometimes it can sit there for minutes, =
doing nothing, except spinning the stupid beach ball every few seconds.

For example - today I imported a maya scene.  30 seconds long, 1 camera =
and about 200 nulls.  The nulls are static, so only the camera has =
keyframes.  After Effects just sits there and stops, every mouse click =
prompting a beach ball that spins for a few seconds.  Simply opening the =
file, selecting a few nulls and complying them into a new composition =
took about 40 minutes - it should have taken a few seconds.

Despite the tedium I tried several things to fix the dreadful =
performance and nothing worked.

The obvious things like quitting and reopening, and then trying =
rebooting, did nothing.  Caps lock makes no difference - even though the =
scene is only nulls so there's nothing to preview anyway.  Turning the =
layer visibility on and off also made no difference.  I emptied all the =
caches in case it was a disk fragmentation issue.  Ram didn't seem to be =
a problem, with the activity monitor reporting I had 3 gig free.  I =
tried toggling the hardware acceleration on and off.  Even turning off =
the visibility of the nulls in the view options made no difference.  =
After Effects just sat there and beach balled constantly, even when I =
wasn't doing anything.

I converted the nulls to lights using David's script and the problem was =
the same - worse even.

This is very difficult to understand.  There is nothing to render - no =
layers except nulls.  All layers are turned off.  The nulls are static =
and don't have keyframes.  There are no hidden gotchas like motion blur, =
frame blending or depth of field.  No plugins.  Just 200 nulls and a =
camera and everything grinds to a halt.  Even turning off the visibility =
of the lights and nulls makes no difference - so even with nothing to =
display After Effects is just sitting there and beach balling, taking a =
minute to respond to each mouse click.

If I delete most of the nulls / lights then performance will suddenly =
improve.  It's like there's a hidden threshold for the number of nulls =
and lights After Effects can handle, and once you go over it the =
performance falls off a cliff.  I have worked on compositions with =
almost 2000 layers - all with masks, effects and expressions applied, so =
I don't understand why a few nulls or some lights can practically break =
the application...

Any insight?  Or even sympathy from those who've experienced similar =
things?  It's driving me insane=85


-Chris