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MP 7,1 The frustration of using After Effects on the new Mac Pro.
- Thread starter chfilm
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I work primarily with RED footage, often 8K and am quite interested in moving to Resolve. Anyone currently doing 8K in Resolve on a 7,1 who can provide some real world perspective on what kind of resources it would take to have snappy response during editorial? What about client supervised color sessions?
After reading this thread, I'm quite happy my assistant editor asked me if he could use Resolve for our short feature. I haven't been happy with Adobe for years, and even though my CC subscription is only $12/year, I like to provide my students with alternatives since their subscriptions are higher.
So far Resolve is quite nice and happy we switched. We even put the free version on all our lab computers for students to try out.
So far Resolve is quite nice and happy we switched. We even put the free version on all our lab computers for students to try out.
though the slow scrolling is still my biggest complaint about Resolve right now. I dont understand why it's like this, in the cut page its super responsive and fast, but in the edit page it's artifically slowed down. Maybe it's so that we buy one of their panels and use an actual jog..
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Fellow color grader of mine has a 28 core with RX580 and three Radeon VIIs inside and 192gb ram and he can handle pretty much all red footage in resolve just fine
That's a pretty pricey workstation config. I was hoping to get by with 16c/96RAM/RX580/and just one VII GPU. I'd expect that config to be enough grunt to edit 8K in FCPX - but then I'm in FCPX and needing to round trip for color...
I can scrape up enough to go 16c/192RAM/RX580 and two Radeon VIIs. If that still left me stuttering in an 8K Resolve timeline, I might have to go Threadripper and hire freelance IT peeps to keep it tight.
Well his setup might be overkill for you because obviously he’s doing heavy color grading on such footage.
i would expect our 16core with two VIIs to be powerful enough, but I can ask him if you want.
I've heard rumours that Maxon are making a compositor / editor that's timeline AND node based and used OpenFX plugins that will use the awesome completely customisable Cinema 4D interface.
Makes sense - they've gone subscription so will need more products to pull people in. They've bought redshift. Merged with Red Giant, why if not for video work.
Technical stuff is there too.. new Node System that's exensible. Dropping COFFEE for python and other clues.
Bring it on! After Effects Sucks these days and woefully neglected and Nuke is £$4000+. Fusion is a possibility...
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Actually. None of that should matter. Adobe don't need to do anything specific for each GPU - They only need to implement Metal and all the Mac GPUs will function well.
That recommendation page was
January 2020 (14.0.1) and November (14.0) releases
so wouldn't have applied for the Mac Pro that only came out in late December really anyway.
Doesn't defend Adobe though. Their CPU and GPU use is terrible overall.
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I'm a dailies/one-light/primaries level grader which is perfect for DIT days and sanity checks for the DP/producer/client/etc near set. I also do editorial and many clients expect me to "fix" the color for collaborative review - and to show the finals colorist a rough idea of what was intended.
My other crucial requirement is being able to play back 8K RED files at full debayer at up to 30FPS with no stuttering for QC. Half res displayed at 1080 is a risky way to check sharps (focus).
My other crucial requirement is being able to play back 8K RED files at full debayer at up to 30FPS with no stuttering for QC. Half res displayed at 1080 is a risky way to check sharps (focus).
Hey now, they're GPU-optimizing their effects, like two at a time in each revision! They'll be done in five years
Definitely one of the factors keeping me from a 7,1. So much potential performance would be wasted. I'm not in Logic, Final Cut, and Resolve anywhere as much as CC.
Yeah I doubt Cavalry will go anywhere but they certainly identify the big problem—basically everything I love doing in After Effects is through third-party plugins.
Super interested in where the Maxon/RG merger goes.
A new challenger appears!
Mainframe Studio has been developing Cavalry, an app to rival After Effects and introduce some healthy competition into the motion graphics domain. They open up their beta very shortly.
Mainframe Studio has been developing Cavalry, an app to rival After Effects and introduce some healthy competition into the motion graphics domain. They open up their beta very shortly.
Cool, yea I guess we're not the only ones annoyed to death by this. Let's see what it can do.
Yesterday I spoke with my Apple Business sales rep again in the store and he said that After Effects and Premiere were running in some sort of almost like a virtual machine and were never really fully ported and written with native OSX programming, and that's why they are so sluggish and slow.
I wouldn't take what sales reps from other companies say about a competing product. AE and Pr aren't all that fast on Windows either. So I don't think what the guy said is even remotely true.
Sales people are professional liars. Bear that in mind.
I know I wasn’t sure to trust him either, but it sure feels that way in the way that all the adobe apps are not written on modern code and not using metal for their UI.
I transitioned from final cut studio and went to premiere because using fpcx was like usin imovie to me.
I know that fcpx is now closer to a normal “NLE” editor, and I have yet to use Davinci for anything than converting files because the speed gain over PP was lost by my poor knowledge of the software.
also the subscription scheme just irritates me. I like to own my stuff.
But for what i am doing (very long timelapse, and a lot of video based on photography such as bullet time or frame by frame hyperlapse/stop motion, nothing works like cataloguing and grading raw photos in lightroom, convert photo sequence to video in AE , and cutting in premiere...
this is the only workflow that alows me to change some image grading decisions in lightroom at raw level, and just need to rerender that very portion in editing without throwing the cut all over the place... also when i went from a I7 hackintosh to a real macpro, every software was slower, but i gain the ablity to have lightroom exporting a 500 000 image catalogue , while still able to work in AE and Premiere were the Hack would become so un responsive that I would have to wait for lightroom to finish.
On my maxed out 5.1 I could barely feel the difference if lightroom or AE was exporting in the background while cutting in premiere.
I really feel that my 16 core 7.1 will be the same : not drastically faster than a maxed out MBP 16” on single task, but truly able to multi task with no sweat with very huge task on background.
My MBP will convert a 3 min 4kp50 rush in h264 twice as fast as my 5.1 but would simply not be able to handle a 500k raw image catalogue in lightroom....
I guess it is a give and take but I deeply think that unless you are doing stupid stuff like I do, for most of the one man team videographer working with dslr and compressed codec, you are better of with a maxed out MBP 16”
a very good egpu, and a very good screen.
I sometimes do lightroom export that last 7 or 8 days so this is just not viable on a laptop or an imac no matter what. but solly for cutting sake, any new high end , with either of the 3 main NLE software is the same if you only do h264 4kp25 from a sony a7sii.
I’m very impatient to recieve my 1dxmkiii because it looks like raw 5.5k video from that camera is incredibly hard on computer, and barely usable on a maxed out 16” MBP with a w9100 egpu.
I really think adobe at sometime will have to react like apple had to, and canon had to, to gain back real pro who dictates what the standard is.
so far all my customer need PP project or FCPX project , no one want to hear about resolve. but clearly i can feel FCPX gaining a lot of traction!
I know that fcpx is now closer to a normal “NLE” editor, and I have yet to use Davinci for anything than converting files because the speed gain over PP was lost by my poor knowledge of the software.
also the subscription scheme just irritates me. I like to own my stuff.
But for what i am doing (very long timelapse, and a lot of video based on photography such as bullet time or frame by frame hyperlapse/stop motion, nothing works like cataloguing and grading raw photos in lightroom, convert photo sequence to video in AE , and cutting in premiere...
this is the only workflow that alows me to change some image grading decisions in lightroom at raw level, and just need to rerender that very portion in editing without throwing the cut all over the place... also when i went from a I7 hackintosh to a real macpro, every software was slower, but i gain the ablity to have lightroom exporting a 500 000 image catalogue , while still able to work in AE and Premiere were the Hack would become so un responsive that I would have to wait for lightroom to finish.
On my maxed out 5.1 I could barely feel the difference if lightroom or AE was exporting in the background while cutting in premiere.
I really feel that my 16 core 7.1 will be the same : not drastically faster than a maxed out MBP 16” on single task, but truly able to multi task with no sweat with very huge task on background.
My MBP will convert a 3 min 4kp50 rush in h264 twice as fast as my 5.1 but would simply not be able to handle a 500k raw image catalogue in lightroom....
I guess it is a give and take but I deeply think that unless you are doing stupid stuff like I do, for most of the one man team videographer working with dslr and compressed codec, you are better of with a maxed out MBP 16”
a very good egpu, and a very good screen.
I sometimes do lightroom export that last 7 or 8 days so this is just not viable on a laptop or an imac no matter what. but solly for cutting sake, any new high end , with either of the 3 main NLE software is the same if you only do h264 4kp25 from a sony a7sii.
I’m very impatient to recieve my 1dxmkiii because it looks like raw 5.5k video from that camera is incredibly hard on computer, and barely usable on a maxed out 16” MBP with a w9100 egpu.
I really think adobe at sometime will have to react like apple had to, and canon had to, to gain back real pro who dictates what the standard is.
so far all my customer need PP project or FCPX project , no one want to hear about resolve. but clearly i can feel FCPX gaining a lot of traction!
Adobe are certainly no strangers to releasing products containing some sort of emulation layer, wouldn't be surprised if parts of their code for the aforementioned apps has been ported this way if that's the faster, cheaper way to do it.
I've been using AE since around v6 in the PowerPC days. Currently using it on a mixture of Macs and Windows systems. Every time some new computer or gpu or whatever comes out, it's always followed by Adobe users doing benchmarks and being disappointed. AE has always preferred fast storage, lots of ram, and low core count cpus with high clock speed. Premiere had a brief lead with the Mercury engine when it first came out around the same time as FCPX. It's currently the best best on Windows, but only with dealing with .r3d files using RTX cards. For everything else it's pretty bad given the alternatives.
Having used Adobe apps for more than a decade and watching computing hardware get as fast as it is while Adobe apps remain stagnant, I find it confusing why anyone would continue using it as their primary means of content creation. But this is the same crowd that shoots and edits h.264 files. Apple made ProRes for a reason.
Having used Adobe apps for more than a decade and watching computing hardware get as fast as it is while Adobe apps remain stagnant, I find it confusing why anyone would continue using it as their primary means of content creation. But this is the same crowd that shoots and edits h.264 files. Apple made ProRes for a reason.
Well for a lot of people it's what they learnt. Also how well the Various Above apps integrate together, like Premiere and AE.
I've been using Premiere since 2.0 (1992) and AE since 3.1... and Damn they don't listen... to anyone.
The Core is slow and old and nothing takes advantage of Multi GPU or CPUs properly.
The menu bar is awful - with a massive lack of tools.
Path / mask handling is terrible.
The Forum even recommend you don't export H264 from it... but to use Media encoder... why not embed media encoder into it properly.
The UI is outdated convoluted mess with menu items hidden in right click menus(!) and hasn't been touched in year to any real extent.
AE's project window is a example. On 30" 4k monitor a the asset preview window at the top is about .5cm across. Why no bins, why no thumbnails for all the assets?
No folders in the timeline (despite many people mananging to make various hack scripts that kind of do it)
Basically it's just crap with no competition that can actually do what most people need from a compositor.
The overall UI has not been touched in about 20years. It's exactly the freaking same as 4.0 from 1999!
For love of Zod Maxon... please be making a compositor.
AE's panel interface might be slow on a Mac, but it's even worse on Windows systems with way higher specs. It was so bad I moved what little AE work I still do back to a trashcan MP.
I've had good luck with Blackmagic's Fusion Studio for compositing. The version integrated into Resolve Studio is still pretty bad by comparison. The standalone version is way faster than Nuke at a fraction of the cost. Nuke still has a few things Fusion doesn't, but most OFX plugins work in both. It really feels like a modern version of Shake. Apple's Motion is okay, but I miss Shake.
Today I started working on a hefty 5 minute, 4K keying project with some light animations in between, and for the very first time, thanks to rendergarden, my shiny new Mac Pro could demonstrate its power... I saw almost 99% cpu load and a ram occupation of 160gb(!!) for about 50 minutes of rendering when I was finished. The same project took several Hours on a colleagues machine (don’t know his exact specs, but it was so bad that he planned half a day of rendering )
so it’s not all bad, but still of course the performance while actually working is super disappointing and without rendergarden, rendering would also be painfully slow. This plugin is an absolute MUST have if you use afx on the new machine IMO.
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I can tell you, resolve is where it’s at! Forget FCP...The collaboration possibilities with the color grader are just insanely impressive.
And yes, multitasking is where the new Mac Pro really excels, even during my hefty aforementioned 1 hour render, I could continue working on stuff normally!
)so it’s not all bad, but still of course the performance while actually working is super disappointing and without rendergarden, rendering would also be painfully slow. This plugin is an absolute MUST have if you use afx on the new machine IMO.
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Haha that’s hilarious, they really didn’t change a thing except they made it darker lol
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I can tell you, resolve is where it’s at! Forget FCP...The collaboration possibilities with the color grader are just insanely impressive.
And yes, multitasking is where the new Mac Pro really excels, even during my hefty aforementioned 1 hour render, I could continue working on stuff normally!
HOLD ON A MINUTE!
cavalry.scenegroup.co
This was posted before...but is now in beta.
Now this has promise!*
*but doesn't actually work with video yet!
Cavalry - Powerful 2D Animation Software for Mac and Windows
Created by animators, for animators — Cavalry makes 2d animation smarter, easier and faster to produce. Design in real-time for advertising, mobile, data visualisation, web, broadcast, ui, generative art, experiential, games and more.
This was posted before...but is now in beta.
Now this has promise!*
*but doesn't actually work with video yet!
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space bar to playback doesnt even work in this betaHOLD ON A MINUTE!
Cavalry - Powerful 2D Animation Software for Mac and Windows
Created by animators, for animators — Cavalry makes 2d animation smarter, easier and faster to produce. Design in real-time for advertising, mobile, data visualisation, web, broadcast, ui, generative art, experiential, games and more.
This was posted before...but is now in beta.
Now this has promise!*
*but doesn't actually work with video yet!
Until this page is updated with legitimate info, there's not a whole lot to get excited about.
scene.zendesk.com
Would not be the first vendor to start off with lofty expectations and then switch pricing model after getting "feedback" from demanding users that results in massive investments of software programming/engineering staff.
Many of these smaller companies outsource portions of coding when it gets to that level to stay "cheap" or else they heavily invest in staff and it quickly becomes the Avid/Autodesk price point for end-users.
...or they get a buyout offer from a bigger player, which unfortunately is the business model for many of them. (The Vitec Group is probably already eying them up.)
Wish them luck. This portion of the industry needs some smaller companies to kick the rear of the bigger ones into a higher gear.
Launch and Pricing
See - https://medium.com/cavalry-animation/cavalrys-next-chapter-cbe55ef82086 Launch Date We’re targeting July 2020 to release Cavalry 1.0. Pricing options We’re launching with two pricing options....
Would not be the first vendor to start off with lofty expectations and then switch pricing model after getting "feedback" from demanding users that results in massive investments of software programming/engineering staff.
Many of these smaller companies outsource portions of coding when it gets to that level to stay "cheap" or else they heavily invest in staff and it quickly becomes the Avid/Autodesk price point for end-users.
...or they get a buyout offer from a bigger player, which unfortunately is the business model for many of them. (The Vitec Group is probably already eying them up.)
Wish them luck. This portion of the industry needs some smaller companies to kick the rear of the bigger ones into a higher gear.
then it has absolutely no promise.HOLD ON A MINUTE!
Cavalry - Powerful 2D Animation Software for Mac and Windows
Created by animators, for animators — Cavalry makes 2d animation smarter, easier and faster to produce. Design in real-time for advertising, mobile, data visualisation, web, broadcast, ui, generative art, experiential, games and more.
This was posted before...but is now in beta.
Now this has promise!*
*but doesn't actually work with video yet!