On Friday, December 13, 2013 at 6:22 AM, Fritz Gnad wrote:

Hi Chris,
have the same impression. I was working on a project that involved 25 (!) null objects connected to plexus. In CS6 and CC I was not able to work because it was so terribly slow. I ended up working in 5.5 where performance was just perfect. Exactly the same plexus setup. I tried things like turning off the cache indicator (which sound like a voodoo-solution to me) but I did not find a solution in CS6 and CC.
Greetings from Cologne.
Fritz

Am 13.12.13 12:51, schrieb Frederich Munch:

Turned off keyframe-motion-trails?

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To: AE-List@media-motion.tv
From: chris@chriszwar.com
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2013 21:42:16 +1100
Subject: Re: [AE] Sluggish performance with many nulls and lights

On 11/12/2013, at 5:53 PM, adam mercado <adam@influxx.com> wrote:

Chris, did you ever get to the bottom of this? Did your experience improve? Just curious

No.  I am fairly certain it's a bug / unfortunate behaviour with the caching system introduced with CS6- but that's just a gut feeling, no hard evidence.  

I should try it with CS5 and see what the difference it.  I've used CS5 for years and have worked with comps that have over 1000 layers in them.  I'm used to importing scenes from 3D apps with lots of nulls.  It's only since using CS6 that I've seen this behaviour.

I always feel reluctant to submit bug reports when I'm not using the current release.  I know that Todd has said that CC fixed a lot of bugs, but I don't have a copy to compare.

I've been working with a few other comps that have lots of layers (roughly 200) and expressions and haven't had as many issues with them.

If I find some spare time - very unlikely - I will experiment some more because it's very frustrating when it happens!

-Chris

On Dec 3, 2013, at 1:25 PM, pixelbot@comcast.net wrote:

are these nulls all different solids - so that you have 200 solids or have you tried changing all the different nulls to one solid? just a thought.

Timt

On Tuesday, December 3, 2013 at 3:17 AM, Chris Zwar wrote:

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…

-Chris