Excessively slow performance in AE

I just downloaded and installed the trial of After Effects CS4 today. The program is running excessively slow, to the point of unusability. Every action, mouse click, menu selection, etc takes 10 to 20 seconds to process (everything hangs and the mouse pointer 'animates').

Rendering is impossibly slow. A 15-second 1080i clip takes more than *2 hours* to render. The program also crashes occasionally during rendering.

Several times the program stopped responding altogether, and I had to use Task Manager to kill the process. There were several instances of ''AfterFX.exe'' running each time in the Task Manager process list.

I went into edit-%26gt;preferences and tried checking the option to process multiple frames simultaneously, no change.

I have Premiere, Photoshop, Flash and Illustrator (all CS3) and use them with no problems.

I'm using an HP 2.4Ghz quad-core Pentium, 4GB RAM, with Windows Vista OS.

Excessively slow performance in AE

FYI the source clip is a Quicktime 1920x1080 12mbps file, exported from Premiere.

Excessively slow performance in AE I just downloaded and installed the trial of After Effects CS4 today.

Thanks for the quick reply.?I just downloaded and installed the update.?I'm still seeing the same slow performance however.

Well, ''12Mbps clip from Premiere''? What format? If it's H.264 or something similar, then I wouldn't wonder about bad performance. AE needs to decode and conform it again. AE always works uncompressed, it does not operate natively on compressed formats. Please try and use a ''normal'' Quicktime clip using Animation or PNG compression. Other than that, you could suffer from a misconfiguration in your graphics card. In that case, turning off OpenGL in the prefs is a first step.

Mylenium

Thanks for the reply.

I turned off OpenGL in After Effects.?Now, I switched to a 720p project size. I re-encoded the same source clip (shot with a green screen) as a Quicktime 1280x720 PNG sequence from Premiere, then imported this clip into After Effects. I encoded a second clip to use as a background image, then used Keylight, color key, simple choker matte, and color balance effects to key out the background in the first clip.

The total length of this project is just over 15 seconds, or 446 frames.

The software still hangs for 10-20 seconds with every little action, click, drag, menu access, etc, even before I apply any of the aforementioned effects to the top layer clip.

Now, when I attempt to render this project out as a 1280x720 PNG sequence in After Effects, the encoder estimates a render time of:

[b]2 hours and 10 minutes[/b]

That is roughly 20 seconds of render time per frame.

One the bottom of the encoder window, the ''estimated RAM usage'' is at 20%.

In Adobe Premiere CS3, when I take the exact same clip and apply a chroma key, color key, fast color corrector and non-red key effect to the clip, with a second video track underneath, the render only takes about 5 minutes!

OK, I've isolated the problem to the HD import format. AE doesn't like Quicktime files.?I've tried exporting from Premiere in H.264 and PNG formats. Can't get AE to import HDV files at all (m2ts or mpegs).

I just tried an SD keying project using a DV AVI file, and it ran smoothly.?The program crashed on rendering, however.

I haven't seen where others are having such a hard time with this, but I sure am. The output from AE looks great, but it's like pulling teeth to get the program to do it in HD.

That sounds liek a deeper problem with your hardware and based thereon, your audio and vidoe handling. Do you use a dedicated video capture card? professional audio equipment with exotioc drivers? Often such things take a vengeanc on Ae, as it has limited support for anything that does not comply to certain specs...

Mylenium

As Mylenium pointed out you might have a deeper problem. AE is actually able to import HDV and mpegs without any problems.

Are you using the retail version or the demo version ?