Looking at resource monitor, I'm not using my hardware to it's full potential.
Here's what I got:
Intel i7 870 2.93Ghz (4 real cores + 4HT)
16GB of DDR3 1600MHz
Nvidia GT 430 (1GB, 96 CUDA Cores, 700MHz)
Windows 7 64bit.
So, I've configured AE CS6 according to this tutorial: http://tv.adobe.com/watch/digital-video-cs6/how-to-optimize-after-effe cts-cs6-for-high-performance/?go=
I've enabled Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously, set CUPs reserved to other Applications to 4 (giving 4 real CPUs to AE) with 3GB of RAM Allocation per CPU (for a total of 12GB) leaving a healthy 4GB of RAM for other applications.
The system disk is a 64Gb SSD and I've got another similar one set up as the scratch.
GPU rendering is enabled and so is harware accelerated Fast Previews.
I've got a single FullHD composition (from pre-processed defished TIF stills) and I'm running 3 filters in the following order:
a) - Warp Stabilizer (Synthesize Edges, just 0.2s for Synthesis Input Range and 25pixels Feather)
b) - Color Finesse (just a shadow boost through curves)
c) - Noise reduction (3 passes IIRC, 60% opacity)
I'm rendering to uncompressed.
From enabling/disabling those effects, I'd say a) takes 40% of the time, b) less than 10% and c) over 50%.
Each video frame takes about 9s to process.
I'm not running "anything else" and the issue I'm facing is that CPU frequency only oscilates between 1200MHz minimum and 1600MHz maximum as if AE wasn't pushing the CPUs.
4 CPU's are being used at ~60% each, with the virtual cores parked as expected, as can be seen from the attached capture. The source footage is on a regular 1.5TB disk but disk usage is dismall 1.2MB read and 600K writes...
GPU usage is also NULL.
Shouldn't the CPUs be at 100% and full clock? I could understand if it's not in the nature of Warp Stabilizer to be parallel friendly but those regular spikes on CPU 2 (which are consistent with 9s per frame) show that neither Noise Reduction is taxing the CPU...
What gives?
Thanks in advance.
Duarte Bruno.
(edit) This disk where the footage lies easily breaks 50MB/s so it can't be the culprit and I've tried a small compression job on VirtualDub that easily sends the CPU flying to full speed.