- Jul 16, 2013
- 4
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- 10,510
Hi all,
Question: How far can we take RAM / Cores for Premiere and After Effects to significantly speed it up?
Short Explanation (TL;DR: Wondering if Premiere Pro and After Effects projects will be given significant speed bost with a workstation filled with lots of cores and RAM - I am trying to be sure such an uprade will actually perform significantly faster than a consumer-grade PC. It's a lot of money to waste if it's "not that much better". Searching for educated opinions / examples of this type of setup as my own google searching doesn't bring up anything).
Long Explanation
A large project is coming up and with the previous project being an absolute nightmare (i7 with 16gb ram and nVidia GPU accel) I am wondering if it is worth investing in a more brute-force approach workstation (lots of ram, lots of cores) to allow many many instances of After Effects to be run using the multiple-core settings in Preferences. Each instance of AE would run on one core and have its own 3, 4, 5 Gigabyte allocation of RAM. I know there are 8 Core CPUs for the mainstream a la AMD Piledriver and the up-and-coming Haswell - but I can't wait for Haswell and Piledriver is only giving 8 cores and anaemic ones at best. As the project is going to start soon - perhaps in a few months - something that is on the market at the moment is what our options are going to be open to.
I've been investigating Opterons and server motherboards that can house 16 cores and upwards of 128GB of RAM (possibly even 256) sure they are not the fastest cores but the important thing is they can run AE instances and we can allocate RAM to those AE instances - but before I put in a request to order such a monstrously expensive solution (yet still significantly cheaper than the next level up of professional video editing solutions) I am trying to work out if it actually will be of benefit...... yes it appears possible in theory - but usually when you dream up something like this somebody has already done this before you and you can find their setups online via YouTube or some blogging sites... at least some example of somebody running this type of setup. The problem is I can't find anyone running a setup this way - so that is immediately a red flag. Either it doesn't work or there is a better solution or all of the above.
If a modest investment on a beefy machine can streamline this workflow it would be great. But it's really important that we are 100% sure it is going to work - Otherwise there is no point and we don't want to gamble, we'll just stick with the i7s and get some more ram, more SSDs and call it a day and just accept the fact that it's going to be a waiting game when we edit those parts of the film.
Normally on short films this isn't a problem. If it takes you a few days more that's no big deal - but on a 150 minute feature using 4.5k Red One and 5k Epic footage with some 2k GoPro inbetween the hours waiting for AE just pile up. When you have spent 5 months editing a film....... wondering how many hours were wasted scrubbing AE stuff in glacial slow motion - I wouldn't be surprised if a hundred hours or more was wasted over the course of editing. Even if we save 50 hours of that with a beefier machine we would get our moneys worth - so if you have any knowledge or examples of anything pushed to those levels for AE to run significantly faster I'd really appreciate it.
Question: How far can we take RAM / Cores for Premiere and After Effects to significantly speed it up?
Short Explanation (TL;DR: Wondering if Premiere Pro and After Effects projects will be given significant speed bost with a workstation filled with lots of cores and RAM - I am trying to be sure such an uprade will actually perform significantly faster than a consumer-grade PC. It's a lot of money to waste if it's "not that much better". Searching for educated opinions / examples of this type of setup as my own google searching doesn't bring up anything).
Long Explanation
A large project is coming up and with the previous project being an absolute nightmare (i7 with 16gb ram and nVidia GPU accel) I am wondering if it is worth investing in a more brute-force approach workstation (lots of ram, lots of cores) to allow many many instances of After Effects to be run using the multiple-core settings in Preferences. Each instance of AE would run on one core and have its own 3, 4, 5 Gigabyte allocation of RAM. I know there are 8 Core CPUs for the mainstream a la AMD Piledriver and the up-and-coming Haswell - but I can't wait for Haswell and Piledriver is only giving 8 cores and anaemic ones at best. As the project is going to start soon - perhaps in a few months - something that is on the market at the moment is what our options are going to be open to.
I've been investigating Opterons and server motherboards that can house 16 cores and upwards of 128GB of RAM (possibly even 256) sure they are not the fastest cores but the important thing is they can run AE instances and we can allocate RAM to those AE instances - but before I put in a request to order such a monstrously expensive solution (yet still significantly cheaper than the next level up of professional video editing solutions) I am trying to work out if it actually will be of benefit...... yes it appears possible in theory - but usually when you dream up something like this somebody has already done this before you and you can find their setups online via YouTube or some blogging sites... at least some example of somebody running this type of setup. The problem is I can't find anyone running a setup this way - so that is immediately a red flag. Either it doesn't work or there is a better solution or all of the above.
If a modest investment on a beefy machine can streamline this workflow it would be great. But it's really important that we are 100% sure it is going to work - Otherwise there is no point and we don't want to gamble, we'll just stick with the i7s and get some more ram, more SSDs and call it a day and just accept the fact that it's going to be a waiting game when we edit those parts of the film.
Normally on short films this isn't a problem. If it takes you a few days more that's no big deal - but on a 150 minute feature using 4.5k Red One and 5k Epic footage with some 2k GoPro inbetween the hours waiting for AE just pile up. When you have spent 5 months editing a film....... wondering how many hours were wasted scrubbing AE stuff in glacial slow motion - I wouldn't be surprised if a hundred hours or more was wasted over the course of editing. Even if we save 50 hours of that with a beefier machine we would get our moneys worth - so if you have any knowledge or examples of anything pushed to those levels for AE to run significantly faster I'd really appreciate it.
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