After Effects Red Colorspace Workflow

[Bruce Allen]

I don't recommend jumping back and forth between using color management and not using it when you are doing color-specific work, but it is generally not a problem to turn it off (as well as work at a lower color bit depth) when doing non-color-specific things, like animating.

However, I am surprised that you're seeing so much difference in performance between using color management and not using it. What are your hardware specs?

BTW, here's a page full of resources about speeding up After Effects.

This is normal for us - color management makes everything unplayable in real-time. We're on various Mac Pros from 12-core to 8-core, 16GB RAM, etc. When Adobe makes Color Management usable, we look forward to using it!

Until then... if I want to use color management, I do it manually by sticking an Adjustment layer on top with Color Profile Converter. But try explaining that to a bunch of freelancers!

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Julien Deka]

However, I am surprised that you're seeing so much difference in performance between using color management and not using it. What are your hardware specs?

Hi Todd, thank you for sharing those pages. I was already aware of all the infos in it…

The current system I'm working on is a Mac Pro with SL 10.6.8, with 2 processors 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (AE recognizes 16 CPU) and 16 GB of 1066MHz DDR3…

The graphic cards are : ATI Radeon HD 5770 and NVIDIA GeForce GT 120. No RED Rocket.

I'm allocating 12GB of RAM for Adobe programs and live the rest for the other apps (usually PPro, AE and Safari are the 3 apps running simultaneously on my Mac - + rarely Photoshop, and sometimes Adobe Media Encoder stays open after having render something)…

I don't use the MultiProcessor function, since I had very bad results with it in CS5, generally (I don't remember exactly, but before each preview the software - AE - was doing a certain task that was taking forever, and completely annulated the idea of gaining time with multiprocessing). But today, as I was testing stuffs around with Epic footage, I turned the MP on, for the first time in CS5.5, and it seems to be responding well. I left 6 CPUs out of 16 for other apps, and allocating 1GB of Ram per CPU (the software then tells me that 6 processors will be used).

I'm working in a 4K comp, with Epic footage scaled down at 80%.

With Color Management turned on, Rec709, Linearize Working Space, the RAM preview render pretty okay (doesn't seems much slower than un-manage project), but the play back is impossible. The preview window tell me in red (half res):
05 fps / 23.976 (NOT REAL TIME)
note: project color working space is on.

at quarter res, it goes up to 10fps, but still no real time…

If I start to apply effects in Linearize Working Space, but need to turn off color management to be able to preview my animation in Real Time, it's going to look so different, it makes it impossible to use for me.

Alos, I should add that I tried to play with Synthetic Aperture Color Finesse 3, when working in a Linearize Working Space… If I open the pluggin in its Full Interface mode, it doesn't look the same as what I can see in AE window. It is way darker when I'm inside Color Finesse. So it makes the pluggin un-usable, and that's too bad, because I like to use his vectorescope and other parades tools.

 

[Les C.]

Premiere Pro doesn't have a color management system.

Todd - I'm getting this error whenever I save my AE project file.

This is CS 5.5 10.5.0.253 (all the current updates) and this is a fresh installation.

The project contains one comp containing one R3D from:
http://www.red.com/learn/workflows/rcx-x-pro-motion-to-stills-workflow

and nothing has been done to the comp.

Thanks, Les