Hi,
I recently put together another 'budget' PC for my work... which is mainly web development. I do some Premiere video. I -sometimes- use AE, but frankly I only know enough to borrow from other's projects.
Haswell 4770k, 16GB DDR3, 240GB SSD. I'm using the built-in graphics. This is working -fine- for my Premiere needs. Renders are peppy.
What surprises me is that AE is such a rendering -dog-. Specifically, I downloaded this Ocean project: http://vimeo.com/5384704
The project renders in 5 minutes. But then I made what I -thought- were a couple very minor tweaks... ie. I automated the transparency of a couple of the layers... and then render time ballooned to 1hr.
So, I activated Multi-Processing, moved the caches to the SSD and the effects? Negligible. I just found out about the Background Renderer which I'm going to try tomorrow, but I was also wondering if there are any other things I should try?
1. I was led to believe that the GPU is not really a major factor in AE rendering times. Correct?
2. AE says it's using 14.7GB cache during rendering. Would investing in more RAM chips -significantly- help?
3. Is there something about using keyframes with opacity that is a real CPU hog? Or are keyframes in -general- the reason for the huge rendering time increase? I knew certain effects were more intense than others, but this was a surprise.
Any other suggestions? I'm sure this has been asked a zillion times but I wanted to cover all the bases since the increase in rendering time caught me off-guard.
TIA.
---JC