Slow render After Effects(Minimax)

[Adimarsy]

Im experiencing an issue with a certain effect. Im using Adobe After Effects cc 2015, and after putting minimax to make my audio spectrum have cube like form, the render time went from like 2mins export to 30+minutes.

Im exporting in GoPro Cineform for raw-like video, and then converting it in Media Encoder to H.264. Before applying the effect it was all fast and smooth, now it's slow. What seems to be the issue with it?
Also one more thing, After Effects is using like 15-20% of the CPU power even though i have an 8 core 3770, with 12GBs of ram. Mercury Transmit doesn't seem to be working also(Sapphire HD7970)

Any help is appreciated!

[xDanielxOossiex]

Check the settings. Btw, i7 3770 isn't an 8 core. It's a 4 core with Hyper Threading

[AkiraDaarkst]

34 minutes ago, Adimarsy said:

Im experiencing an issue with a certain effect. Im using Adobe After Effects cc 2015, and after putting minimax to make my audio spectrum have cube like form, the render time went from like 2mins export to 30+minutes.

Im exporting in GoPro Cineform for raw-like video, and then converting it in Media Encoder to H.264. Before applying the effect it was all fast and smooth, now it's slow. What seems to be the issue with it?
Also one more thing, After Effects is using like 15-20% of the CPU power even though i have an 8 core 3770, with 12GBs of ram. Mercury Transmit doesn't seem to be working also(Sapphire HD7970)

Any help is appreciated!

CPU = Intel i7 3770?

GPU = Sapphire HD 7970?

 

Can you at least post a screen cap of your AE project, I want to see how many layers and effects you have.  I just did a simple test on a 20 second clip, applying 1 solid layer with the audio spectrum and minimax effects added to that solid over my video clip.  Without minimax, the render time is 18 seconds, with minimax it jumped to 44 seconds.  Therefore I believe it takes a bit more time to render the minimax effects.  I'm trying to find some documentation about minimax, to see whether it's an effect that can utilize GPU processing power but so far I don't see it in the list of effects that Adobe says uses GPU (or CUDA) processing capabilities.

 

I'll try running a few more tests and see what happens with different settings.  In the mean time, have you also enabled AE to utilize your GPU?

[AkiraDaarkst]

OK I performed a more detailed test, using a longer video clip.

The video clip I used for the test is 720p resolution 50 fps, 6 minutes 46 seconds long, taken with a Canon 5D mk III, roughly 50mb/s bit rate.

 

Aside from my OS drive, I have two additional drives in my workstation.  Let's call them Drive X and Drive Y.

i7 4790K

Quadro M4000

32GB

 

Drive X contains my source clip.

 

In After Effects, I created a 16 bit color composition with the same resolution as the video.

Layer 1 = source video clip

Layer 2 which is above layer 1 = a Solid layer with Audio Spectrum and later Minimax effects applied

 

Render settings:

Quicktime, Trillions of Colors, Cineform

 

First Render time (without Minimax): 10 minutes 54 seconds, destination drive of render file same as source drive.

CPU usage: between 35% - 55%, with roughly 45% being the average

GPU usage: 3%

Memory usage: 77% average

 

Just to see if there is an improvement if I set the destination drive to be different from the source drive, I did a second render (also without Minimax): 10 minutes 34 seconds, not really a significant improvement (likely because the drives in my workstation are all optimized for performance).

Similar CPU, GPU and Memory usage as first render.

 

Third render (this time with Minimax, and also rendering to Drive Y): Estimated time (because it is still rendering), roughly 48 minutes

CPU usage: between 23% - 35%, with 30% being the rough average

GPU usage: 3%

Memory usage: 83% average

 

My hypothesis (taking into account the description for Minimax)

Quote

Minimax effect

The Minimax effect assigns each channel of a pixel the minimum or maximum value for that channel found within a specified radius.

This effect can be used to enlarge or reduce a matte. For example, a white solid area surrounded by black shrinks one pixel on each side using Minimum and a radius of 1.

The quality setting of the layer doesn’t affect Minimax.

This effect works with 8-bpc and 16-bpc color.

OperationMinimum assigns each channel of a pixel the minimum value for the specified channel within the specified radius. Maximum assigns each channel of a pixel the maximum value. Minimum Then Maximum performs the Minimum operation and then the Maximum operation. Maximum Then Minimum performs the Maximum operation and then the Minimum operation.

Direction The axis along which to scan for values. Horizontal & Vertical scans all directions.

 

The CPU usage becomes lower than without Minimax because it doesn't require that much processing power to render the effect, however it takes longer to render because it is applying the effect on a per pixel basis to the Audio Spectrum's shape (and perhaps for each frame) hence more items to process.  Without Minimax, it didn't have to render the Audio Spectrum on a per pixel basis, it just needed more processing power to render out the whole spectrum for that frame but there was less stuff to do.  (Sorry if I'm not making complete sense, sometimes I suffer from the Babbage condition, I'm not good at transcribing to words what's going on in my head.)

Minimax does not utilize GPU acceleration.

 

Edited November 10, 2016 by AkiraDaarkst

[Adimarsy]

17 hours ago, AkiraDaarkst said:

OK I performed a more detailed test, using a longer video clip.

The video clip I used for the test is 720p resolution 50 fps, 6 minutes 46 seconds long, taken with a Canon 5D mk III, roughly 50mb/s bit rate.

 

Aside from my OS drive, I have two additional drives in my workstation.  Let's call them Drive X and Drive Y.

i7 4790K

Quadro M4000

32GB

 

Drive X contains my source clip.

 

In After Effects, I created a 16 bit color composition with the same resolution as the video.

Layer 1 = source video clip

Layer 2 which is above layer 1 = a Solid layer with Audio Spectrum and later Minimax effects applied

 

Render settings:

Quicktime, Trillions of Colors, Cineform

 

First Render time (without Minimax): 10 minutes 54 seconds, destination drive of render file same as source drive.

CPU usage: between 35% - 55%, with roughly 45% being the average

GPU usage: 3%

Memory usage: 77% average

 

Just to see if there is an improvement if I set the destination drive to be different from the source drive, I did a second render (also without Minimax): 10 minutes 34 seconds, not really a significant improvement (likely because the drives in my workstation are all optimized for performance).

Similar CPU, GPU and Memory usage as first render.

 

Third render (this time with Minimax, and also rendering to Drive Y): Estimated time (because it is still rendering), roughly 48 minutes

CPU usage: between 23% - 35%, with 30% being the rough average

GPU usage: 3%

Memory usage: 83% average

 

My hypothesis (taking into account the description for Minimax)

The CPU usage becomes lower than without Minimax because it doesn't require that much processing power to render the effect, however it takes longer to render because it is applying the effect on a per pixel basis to the Audio Spectrum's shape (and perhaps for each frame) hence more items to process.  Without Minimax, it didn't have to render the Audio Spectrum on a per pixel basis, it just needed more processing power to render out the whole spectrum for that frame but there was less stuff to do.  (Sorry if I'm not making complete sense, sometimes I suffer from the Babbage condition, I'm not good at transcribing to words what's going on in my head.)

Minimax does not utilize GPU acceleration.

 

Sorry for the late reply.

Thank you for the detailed analysis and explanation.  I provided multiple screenshots of my settings, composition etc.. If you need any more info i can provide it.

Using minimax i guess is out of the equation as it takes way too long for me to produce a single video as i have to pump out more than 5 videos daily. Any other effect that will give a similar effect(right angle edges on the spectrum)?

Thanks!

 

[AkiraDaarkst]

2 hours ago, Adimarsy said:

Sorry for the late reply.

Thank you for the detailed analysis and explanation.  I provided multiple screenshots of my settings, composition etc.. If you need any more info i can provide it.

Using minimax i guess is out of the equation as it takes way too long for me to produce a single video as i have to pump out more than 5 videos daily. Any other effect that will give a similar effect(right angle edges on the spectrum)?

Thanks!

 

OK well you have a few possible options.

1. Leave the render job to be done overnight, or have another computer do it.
2. Try out the mosaic effect instead of minimax.  I doesn't look exactly the same, but might work.
3. There may be a third party effect suite that does the same thing or almost exactly the same thing as minimax, I just don't know which ones do.  They're probably not going to be free.  (One third party effects pack that I like to use is from GenArts, called Sapphire.  Not cheap.)

 

I may have a way where you can save some time using the Minimax effect, let me just perform a few tests and get back later.

 

By the way, if it takes you only 2 minutes to render all of that without Minimax, you're machine's performance is pretty good.

[AkiraDaarkst]

22 hours ago, Adimarsy said:

 

OK here's what I did to shave off some time in rendering out the final version (with the same video clip I used yesterday for testing).

 

I create the same composition, video clip layer and solid layer (containing Audio Spectrum and Minimax).

First I created a render where the video clip layer was turned invisible.  I rendered out only the audio spectrum and minimax effect solid with a RGB + Alpha setting (8 bit per channel, no need for trillions of colors, everything that was not part of the audio spectrum effect became invisible/transparent).

The Audio Spectrum + Minimax only layer took 15 minutes to render (compared to 53 minutes total from yesterday).

Then I imported back that rendered video and created a new composition. This time with the quality settings I wanted.

 

Second composition:

Top layer = Audio Spectrum + Minimax rendered video

Layer below = my video clip

Render time = 10 minutes or so, because this time AE didn't have to process the Audio Spectrum and Minimax effects.  I had the effects pre-rendered in another clip that was just imposed above the video clip I wanted to work on.

 

So total time to render everything took about 25 minutes, cutting my render time by 50%.

 

You could probably save more time by having a pre-rendered audio spectrum video that you can super impose over all other videos you work on when needed, but it would be generic to all music videos you create.

[Adimarsy]

15 hours ago, AkiraDaarkst said:

 

I guess ill manage it somehow and maybe try different designs which may come out better than the current one. Thanks for the big help, ill make sure you get proper upvotes/thumbs up! People like you are what this world needs.