The amazing AE multiprocessing render trick I never knew about

[iline 0]

Sounds like a spam post, but no. Just saw this video from James Whiffin yesterday. You set up your AE render queue with "Multi-machine settings" for both output module and render settings (default is PSD sequence btw) and then set off as many BG Renderer instances as you have processor threads. It is scary fast. Amazing.

Obvs you need to stitch the image sequence and add your sound bed, but that's what Quicktime Pro is for, right?

The added bonus is that if you use RSMB a lot and have to re-render crossed frames (you know, the orange cross that Reelsmart says means you're a pirate even if you bought the f'kin plugin an hour ago) each instance calls up the single frame it needs, skipping the ones that the other BG Renderer instances are working on - meaning no more crossed-out frames!

 

Edit: Got a bit excited there. No, RSMB is truly on a mission to ruin my life.

Happy rendering boyos (yes, I know about 20% of you are all too aware of this, just thought I'd spell it out).

 

 

http://ae.tutsplus.com/tutorials/workflow/significantly-speed-up-your-renders-from-after-effects/

Edited September 2, 2013 by iline

[iline 0]

By the way if you buy BG Renderer Pro you can do the portable app and let all the other computers on your network do their bit too, using all of their processor threads. Well worth $35

[Aaron Scott 0]

Just a heads up, this isn't bullet-proof--the "skip existing files" option (which this depends on) is a little hit-and-miss. On some networks, AE doesn't realise that a frame has already started rending, which means that every instance will always render the same frame.

[levante 0]

Good news: yes it works! Even with those dreaded MP-incompatible plugs from Adobe and you can add or remove CPUs on the fly. If your machine gets to slow / runs out of RAM during a render just “control - c” one of the render processes and be happy.

 

Bad news: it has been working like this for many years

[creativebloke 0]

this could be awesome, and that was just a fantastic tutorial, as it explained the existing workflow, showed the problem and then fixed it.

[parallax 0]

Speed up your renders with this weird old trick.

[deceasar 0]

Very Very Helpful! Thnx!

[superegophobia 0]

Not to trivialize as I don't know programming and I'm sure it's very very difficult... but whenever I see stuff like this or not being able to (natively) retain object buffers naming/render passes to seperate folders in C4D, etc, I always think

Edited September 8, 2013 by superegophobia

[dotcommer 0]

Just wanted to add to this, I've been messing around with BG render Pro for a week or so and I've come up with a couple things I think many might find useful.

 

• I've figured out the proper way to submit a .png image sequence to ffmpeg via bgrender and get a ProRes 422HQ movie back. Really useful.

ffmpeg -r 30 -i [outputFilePath][outputFileNameNoExt]%05d.png -c:v prores_ks -profile:v 3 -pix_fmt yuv444p10le [outputFilePath][outputFileNameNoExt].mov

And for an H264:

ffmpeg -r 30 -i [outputFilePath][outputFileNameNoExt]%05d.png -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -pix_fmt yuv420p [outputFilePath][outputFileNameNoExt].mp4

Lastly, this is related to the workflow described in the video by James Whiffin at the top. He keeps clicking bg render for every instance he wants to create so he maximizes his cores. This so super tedious. So I set it up so that you have BG render saves a render command file, then drop that onto a droplet that will run the command a set number of times that you want. Below is my setup for automator (sorry, mac only :/ )

 

[magictea 0]

Seriously it cannot be that difficult if someone has already solved it with a custom script, the ability to launch multiple render engines already exists as part of the software. The multi-processor implementation in AFX is pretty dire (the majority of the time it actually renders slower so i turn it off). So of my 16 core mac pro 1 is being used

 

Not to trivialize as I don't know programming and I'm sure it's very very difficult...

Edited September 24, 2013 by magictea