AE using fractional amout of computer resources - slow

Question

AE only using 15% of cpus and 2 gig or so of ram
by David Penn on Mar 23, 2009 at 2:12:51 am
Hello,
I went out and bought a new system because is seemed prudent considering I was learning CS4, I was running a quad core, 8 gigs of ram and it seemed 5 hours was a bit to wait for renders on stuff.
So, I bought the Intel Skulltrail 2 processor motherboard, 2 qx9775 3.2 ghz processors and 16 gb or ram, and the ATI radeon 4870hd x2 (2gb) on vista ultimate.
AE is only using 15% of cpu's and 2 gig or so of ram and the same project takes the same amount of time. I have selected multiprocessing in the options, but no real change.
Hmmm, Anyone explain that?
I am going to build this machine,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&
different raid etc.. but after seeing my performance, my disks are not an issue.
thanks,
David

Answer 1

If it's not using more, than it doesn't need it, simply put. MP efficiency is dictated by the type of project and what you use in it. You will see almost zero benefit, if your project is merely simple color corrections on a ton of footage layers or something similar. In that scenario, the file I/O will far outweigh any actual processing and become the bottleneck, even with RAIDs. Likewise, rendering to movie files is less efficient than image sequences, as apparently the frames will have to be rendered sequentially, eliminating any advantages non-sequential rendering may have with image sequences. Even if you have processing-heavy projects with tons of effects, where it may take several minutes to compute one frame, other factors like specific temporal effects not using MP at all figure in. There's a lot to consider, but per se you should not see the failure in AE. Some things are simply dictated by conventional computing principles. Please read the help file and check, whether one ore more of the described conditions apply to your situation and where you have room to optimize.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WSDD65B476-971A-48e9-A5FD-D90E9A2B996E.html
Mylenium