Comments This post collects resources relating to optimizing your computer system and After Effects and Premiere Pro so that you can get the most done in the least time with these applications.
If you have any questions, please bring them to the After Effects forum or the Premiere Pro forum. It’s much harder to have a conversation in the comments of a blog post than on the forum.
The most comprehensive place to find information on improving performance in After Effects is the “Improving performance” page in After Effects Help. Another good starting point is “FAQ: What are the optimum memory settings for best performance in After Effects CS4, CS5, and CS5.5?”.
I recently recorded a series of videos for video2brain that you can get for free on their website:
After Effects & Premiere Pro performance workshop. This series consists of the following free video tutorials:
- The Components of Performance
- Planning Your Work, Updating, and Auto-Saving
- Learning and Customizing Keyboard Shortcuts
- Overview of Data Flow and Common Bottlenecks
- Overview of System Requirements
- Optimizing Hard Disks
- Optimizing CPUs
- GPU: CUDA
- GPU: OpenGL
- Stopping Software Not Relevant To Your Work
- Using Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously Multiprocessing
- Pre-Rendering and Proxies in After Effects
- Lowering Resolution for Previews
- Isolating What You’re Working On
The area that we get the most questions about regarding Premiere Pro performance is how the GPU contributes to performance. Here are a few resources that deal directly with that question:
- “CUDA, Mercury Playback Engine, and Adobe Premiere Pro”
- “Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 improvements in CUDA processing and the Mercury Playback Engine”
- Dennis Radeke’s side-by-side tests of several Quadro cards with Adobe Premiere Pro
Early in 2011, we hosted a one-hour session about optimizing for performance of both Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. Here’s the recording.
In the videos listed above, I make reference to many online resources. Here are those resources for your convenience:
- Auto-save in Premiere Pro and Auto-save in After Effects
- planning your work
- keyboard shortcuts in After Effects and keyboard shortcuts in Premiere Pro
- system requirements for Premiere Pro
- system requirements for After Effects
- CS5: advantages of a 64-bit application and 64-bit operating system
- CS4: Production Premium on 64-bit operating systems
- 32-bit kernel versus 64-bit kernel for Mac OSX
- “What PC to build?” (Premiere Pro Hardware forum thread hosted by Harm Millaard)
- “Generic Guideline for Disk Setup” (Premiere Pro Hardware forum thread hosted by Harm Millaard)
- “To RAID or not to RAID” (Premiere Pro Hardware forum thread hosted by Harm Millaard)
- “Mercury, CUDA, and what it all means” (Premiere Pro forum thread hosted by Todd Kopriva)
- Premiere Pro CS5 Benchmark test and performance reference materials
- Black Viper recommendations for shutting down software unnecessary for your work
- recommended Memory & Multiprocessing settings for After Effects
- setting playback and paused resolution in Premiere Pro and setting preview resolution in After Effects
- setting color depth in After Effects and setting Maximum Bit Depth and Maximum Render Quality in Premiere Pro
- trimming a project with the Project Manager in Premiere Pro and using Reduce Project in After Effects
- OpenGL in After Effects
- disk cache and conformed media cache in After Effects and scratch disks in Premiere Pro
The most comprehensive place to find information on improving performance in After Effects is the “Improving performance” page in After Effects Help. Much of what is listed above can also be found there, plus much more.
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Harm Millard would you Please tell me the real and solid PC to built as like the system but in case I use Adobe (Premier Po CS4-AE CS4 – PS CS4 Extended)
Thanks again for all the insight and condensed information in and after the webinar!
thnx
This only confirms why I got a refund, maybe it will be better by the next PP6.0. What a headache.
Can you PLEASE put this info up as text. I just dont have the time to watch hours/dozens of videos. But a few pages of text would take just minutes to read. I can understand Bob’s comment. sometimes you really make life hard. TEXT PLEASE.