Hi all,

I’m having some serious performance issues with EXRs and I thought I’d check to see if anyone else could help.

I’m working on a fairly big project, all renders are supplied as EXR sequences with lots of channels.  I’m working in 32bit float, linear.
I have downloaded the latest Open EXR plugins from the fnord website (Hey Brendan!  You there?) including Cryptomatte, which is a core tool.

After Effects will work with a single EXR file quite well.  Surprisingly well.  If I import an EXR it opens and displays as quickly as any other format.  If I use the ProEXR make comps feature (100% awesome) then it takes about 8 seconds to extract all the channels and display the contact sheet result.  Cryptomatte and Extractor work very quickly.  So basically - if I have a single exr frame in After Effects then all works fine.  Cryptomatte alone has the potential to be a complete game changer...

But as soon as I import an EXR sequence into AE then it all goes horribly wrong.  Using the Pro EXR make comps feature now takes several minutes.  Using Extractor to isolate a channel from the EXR now takes 30 - 60 seconds per frame.  In some cases AE can take 5 - 10 minutes to show an image.

And here’s the thing - this is for exactly the same exr file.  If I manually import just the first frame of a sequence (or any frame) then one frame is great.  As soon as I work with an exr sequence then everything becomes almost unworkable.

It’s probably cache related.  Yes I have the EXR cache enabled, but I have a suspicion that AE is wanting to cache every channel of the entire sequence before it displays a single frame.

I’m about to make a screen recording of this for Adobe, as this is a significant problem for me and the project I’m on now. 

Any suggestions?


-Chris



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