Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[CS6]
My name is Steve Forde--I'm the Senior Product Manager
for Adobe After Effects and in this video,
we're going to talk about the performance associated with
After Effects CS6.
Now, one of the key features of After Effects CS6
is a feature called, "the Global Performance Cache"
and this is probably one of the biggest
changes in After Effects in terms of how it works
and how it uses all the resources of your Workstation, in conjunction,
to go as fast as possible so that you can see what you're working on
without having to wait for the machine.
So the first thing I want to show you is--
as you can see here from my Workstation, is
while I'm looking at this Comp and I'm using my Disk Cache,
which is part of the Global Performance Cache,
and you can see that, by the blue line here.
And I've also go things checked into RAM--now the nice thing is
is that it's reading it from Disk very quickly
and going into RAM--and then that means
I'm getting, in the case, Realtime performance when I look at things.
Well there's a bunch of factors that come into play here.
So in this Workstation I have 2 Intel Xeon CPUs,
which means I have a total of 16 Cores.
Now, all 16 CPUs are not real CPUs.
8 of those CPUs are Hyperthread CPUs.
Now this is a HPZ800 Workstation
and the hyperthreading offers a lot of benefit
for day-to-day operations
of things like applying an effect and so forth, in After Effects.
However, there are some things that you have to think about
on how those CPUs work with the rest of your Workstation
when it comes to RAM, Disk, and GPU.
So we're going to come back to that in a sec.
Here's the most important part:
I've got 16 CPUs, and I've also got RAM.
I've got to make sure that I've got at least 2 gigabytes of RAM
per CPU, real or otherwise.
In other words, for this Z800,
my minimum configuration--from my perspective--
is 32 Gigs of RAM.
The other thing is that this Workstation
is also utilizing an Intel Solid-State drive.
Now, the Global Performance Cache
is really oriented around using, not just
your memory in a really effective way,
but also persisting the frames to Disk
so that when you say Close After Effects, and open it again,
you can come back to the exact point you left off.
That's going to depend entirely on having Fast Disk.
After Effects will go as fast as the Disk you can throw at it.
In fact, many of the Workstations that I've seen users use--
the biggest problem is Fast Disk.
Not having a fast enough disk--
well, means that your CPUs won't be utilized
and that the RAM actually isn't being checked into
as quickly as it could be
because the disk can't keep up.
And the last component for After Effects CS6 is the GPU.
The GPU--in this case, an Nvidia Quadro 5000--
is being used in a whole different way that has never been
used before in After Effects.
As an example, every pixel that we're rendering to the screen
is now through OpenGL,
which means that you get a faster experience
in terms of how you interact with After Effects.
The other side is that we've put a full Raytracer into After Effects,
meaning that we're using the Optics Toolkit from Nvidia--
and in this case, leveraging the GPU to fully render the scene
and getting equal results, irrespective of what kind of card I have inside.
Now again, that's going to fall back to your CPUs
if you don't have an Nvidia graphics card,
but if you do, you're going to get a lot of really good performance with that.
The second most important thing, after you look at the hardware,
is to go into how you configure After Effects.
So as an example, when I go into my Preferences,
the first thing I want to look at is Media & Disk Cache.
The Global Performance Cache is oriented around,
again, persisting your frames and layers
in a very unique way so that it can render as fast as possible
or only render what's necessary, from that perspective.
So the whole point is you want to make this as big as possible,
and you want to make it be able to assign that to a disk
that is separate from your footage and your system disk.
Again, I highly recommend using Solid-State media.
The faster the disk, the better.
The second component is around memory.
And again, I mentioned that there were 16 CPUs in this Workstation.
Having 2 gigabytes of RAM per CPU is really important,
as a minimum requirement.
The other side is that we're also seeing that all the RAM
can be shared across the Adobe applications within Production Premium.
So that means we're reserving 6 gigabytes
for all other applications outside of Production Premium--
and in this case, 26 gigabytes for Production Premium.
Now, when you come into multiprocessing,
this is where the CPUs come into play again.
As an example, if I turn this feature on,
essentially I'm going to use--in this case--16 CPUs.
Now remember--8 of those CPUs are not full CPUs--
they're Hyperthread CPUs,
which means that After Effects is going to treat it like a real CPU
because that's what the operating system reports to us.
That being said, I want to reserve a bunch of CPUs--
in this case, I know that 8 of them are not real,
so I'm going to reserve 8 CPUs for other applications.
This means that the operating system has a more likely chance
of assigning that frame to a real CPU,
and the job will actually be done faster.
In this case, we're going to say that there's actually 7 CPUs
that will be fully used.
The whole point is that you have to make sure that your Disk,
your RAM, your Graphics Card, and your CPUs
are working in harmony
if you are to really effectively use multiprocessing
the RAM for all the applications in the Suite
and to really get the most out of the Global Performance Cache.
In this video we looked at how to take advantage of your Workstation
and optimize the performance of After Effects CS6
and get everything to work in harmony.
My name is Steve Forde. I'm the Senior Product Manager for Adobe After Effects.
Thanks for watching.
[Adobe]
