Faster render time using less cores! ??

[Michael McCaffrey]

Watching my CPU usage the last few weeks I noticed when rendering only 25% or less of my CPU power was being utilized. In an effort to increase horrendous results, I implemented the BG Render script. The result? Processing power reached an excess of 90%, but render times were longer. a BG Render took 50min whereas the AE render w/ multiprocessing took 14mins. What in the world is going on?

The Comp Details:
One R3D file with a 3D tracker and a ray-traced 3D text object tracked into the camera move. I added an environment layer and a reflection to the text. Added a light to light the text, and a tracking mask to mask out an object that passes in front of the text. That's it. Renders were at 1/2 res (1920x1080) using ProRes 422.

My Mac Pro:
2010 2.66ghz 12-core, 32GB RAM
Media stored on 12TB thunderbolt Raid connected a Mac-Mini server. My machine connects to the mac-mini w/ the RAID over gigabit network.
Using After Effects 12.2, 8bpc, w/ multiprocessing turned on.

 

[Todd T]

Just guessing, maybe the BG render is not making use of GPU acceleration?

 

[Michael McCaffrey]

Looks like switching from "ray-traced" to "classic 3D" mode in AE fixed it . I switched to "classic 3D" and now all of the sudden the multiprocessing is using all the cores. CPU usage is 80-90% now. I decided not to get BG render because it took longer to render than AE did.

 

[Elliott Balsley]

Just curious, how do you like the Mac mini setup over ethernet? I've been considering doing that to add thunderbolt to my Mac Pro, but it seems like 1GBit would be too slow.

 

[Jay Smith]

Generally bg render will render faster than a native AE render. Not by much but its well worth the price. In your case you're getting faster results likely because you have multiprocessing on in AE, but not in BG render. If you get the pro version you can apply the multiprocessing to bg render, or you can use multi-machine settings and get several bg redners going at the same time to use all of your cpu.

Can't have people downplay my most used script!