An Inside Look At OpenGL Within After Effects
basix

An Inside Look At OpenGL Within After Effects

on Jun 30th 2010 with 36 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Requirements: Just After Effects... enjoy!
  • Difficulty: Beginner
  • Run Time: 14 min

In this video we’re going to take a look on how important performance is. We’ll be talking about what OpenGL is and how the new graphics cards Quadro from Nvidia can increase our performance dramatically. For more information, check out “Adobe’s Help Files”.

Tutorial

Download Tutorial .flv

File size 44.5MB

Stefan Surmabojov is Stefoto on Videohive
Tags: Basix
 
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I'm a 21 years old motion graphics designer from Bulgaria. I have 2 years of professional experience behind my back. Most of my time I spend working for a small TV company. In my spare time I work as a freelancer and create video tutorials related to After Effects for our site.  

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  • http://www.youtube.com/ianhpiratao IANH – BR

    Greaaaat, thanks a lot for this!

    Really Helpful

  • http://www.gutsblow.com/ Satya Meka

    Very nice, but I would also like you to remind that if your project isn’t utilizing any OpenGL compatible effects/lights it is not recommended to render with OpenGL since every frame has to be uploaded to the hardware and then download back again, which creates a bottle neck in performance and it performs way slower than just using a CPU render.

  • Drahos

    Great Tutorial!!!! Very useful..

    Very nice titles, can you tell as how you created, please, please.. Lot of people will be happy.. Thank you..

  • http://wwww.tripodbg.com Stefan
    Author

    As I said in the video OpenGL renderer is not recommended for final rendering, but it could help in some cases for example to render a bigger part and use it as a preview to show your client how the project looks etc. Otherwise you’re right :)

  • http://oculusstudios.com Brock Smith

    Isn’t it hard to justify $1,500 if you can only use it for previews??

    • Yes

      You can sofmod 9800gt to quadro 3800 :)
      Their basicly the same hardware! Only the drivers are different :P

      So a card for 70$ becomes what…. YES a card for 1000$ :)

  • http://www.wanah.nl Yorizz

    Lol, I have an ATI RADEon HD 4800×2 1 gig.. With open gl on a test render with box blurs lights and 2d / 3d tranformations it took exactly twice as long as the render with open gl off..
    Appears that only the quadro’s work well with open gl… Ashame the useful versions are incredibly expensive…

    • yes

      Their’s no CUDA in ATI…
      so ur scr*ed!

      Try buying cheap GeForce… and sofmod it :P

      • Raffael

        Well, it’s OpenGL based rendering solution so it doesn’t need CUDA.
        And there is CUDA equivalent on ATI, it’s called Stream.

      • Raffael

        Look at the list of supported cards.

      • Raffael

        Damn, the link disappeared form the comment:

        http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects/opengl.html

  • Mark

    How does he get that nice effect with the text?

  • Billy

    Imagine my shock upon learning that a better graphics card could help improve the performance of a motion graphics program. Who’da thought of such a crazy idea!

  • http://www.youtube.com/user/simboy48 Adam Sklar

    OpenGL always crashes my After Effects.. :(

  • Thomas

    Thank you for aour nice job and information.
    In addition i think it would be worthful to explain to setup all the parameters in the Nvidia-driver of the quadro cards. I think the bets way is, to set it “as is”, but sometime its better to set it up manualy ( think about about the “3D settings” ).

    Tom

  • Billy

    Busted! Next time you copy and paste….credit the source. But I guess when you are creating a tutorial on a topic as awe-inspiring and ground breaking as “a $900 graphics card will provide better motion graphics results than a $100 graphics card” the subtual nuances of source referencing can be forgotten….I’m sure.

  • http://wwww.tripodbg.com Stefan
    Author

    hey buddy.. take it easy! Of course there is a source. I can’t invent all this information, because I’m not the creator of OpenGL or the graphics card or some of the creators of Adobe. You should be thankful for any free information you get here and stop complain and accuse the people that are creating tutorials. If you don’t like the site just don’t visit it! I’m giving an actual example of real life projects and showing how fast can be rendering and what are the advantages and you’re complaining about that… Reading your comments I bet you’re 12 or so..

  • Billy

    I should be thankful that you regurgitated information that almost every After Effects user has already read off from Adobe’s website? Every computer user already knows that better graphics cards provide better motion graphics. You didn’t provide any new information. Sorry you are upset that I am pointing out the obvious…

    • http://wwww.tripodbg.com Stefan
      Author

      You’re thinking wrong, not everybody knows that. There are hundreds of people that are new to After Effects that will learn new things and see real examples. It’s a different thing to see the time difference in the render instead of just reading and imagining how it will be working. And it’s not about providing new information, but the way this information is provided and the examples attached! Don’t think that everybody knows that just because you know it!

      • http://www.youtube.com/ianhpiratao IANH – BR

        Yeah, my graphic card is one GTX 280 and i have no ideia about this technique, This article was very helpful.

      • Sarah

        Exactly I didn’t know that either.. grow up dude! Thanks Stefan

  • WGSXFrank

    I just finished building my new rig which has an Intel 6-core processor Oc’d to 4.2 ghz and 3 nVidia GTX480s OC’d and running in 3-way SLI mode.

    I noticed a HUGE performance increase thanks to this tutorial. Thanks! :D

  • Nick

    First of all, thank you for the information. So you prefer OpenGL over multiprocessing. I don’t have OpenGL support, so yet I cannot test it. However, one can use OpenGL for previews and then multiprocessing for final rendering, if there are certain thing OpenGL would skip… Would you suggest that method?
    I have another question, eve though it is not connected with OpenGL, but with multiprocessing. I have currently equipped with 8GBs of RAM and turned on that feature to render multiple frames simultaneously. I am working with CS4. The problem is that when AE runs the copies of itself this seems to somehow affect my Windows. So when I try to RAM preview it renders one or two frames, then kinda glitches and stops and then, after about 10-15 seconds, renders till the end, but after that asks to close all the copies of AE. The whole reason why I wanted this upgrade was to work faster, but with such a pause I am, on the contrary, decreasing in speed. I suppose it’s somehow my AE’s or my OS’ fault. Do you know what might be the reason? Or how can I fix it? I really need your help and would really appreciate it.

    Thanks for attention.

  • http://vimeo.com/ezils Adam

    From what I’ve heard from one guy at creativecow, OpenGL does more bad things, it is not goof/perfect in AE. A lot of people talk about completly different things happening while previewing and rendering. Many ppl suggest to turn off OpenGL in AE completly.
    in AE CS5 nvidia CUDA is really helpful to speed up your workflow and renderings.

    For some simple examples it can help you out but in my opinion in way complicated compositions it will ruin your animation :)

    Thanks for the tip, I knew some of it but it’s nice to have everything collected on one site.
    Take care
    Adam

  • gui

    I’ve a nvidia gtx 260 and i”ve changed the preview render to OpenGl using 650mb and i don’t know why the render time is taking longer than with the adaptive resolution. Why does it happen?

  • Jesus

    I think it´s a non sense to buy an expensive Quadro card only to take advantage on doing preview renders with AE. It will not be a lot faster than a regular Geforce or Ati card and it will be far way more expensive.

    And AE doesn´t take advantage from CUDA, only OpenGL. Premiere CS5 with it´ s Mercury Engine can take advantage from the Stream Processors of the Nvidia Cards as long as you get a certified Quadro card or a GTX285. There is also a little tweak that lets you activate full hardware support of Mercury Engine if the graphics card has at least 796 MB of memory.

  • http://classyshot.com tom wise

    I’ve got the Nvidia 3800 & AE and have used it ( them) on two different CPU/computers. Open GL does what you say it does..but for the Money, it is not anywhere near as good as the SSD’s I added!

    The hold up in the render/previews scheme is Hard drive, then CPU & RAM. I say this only because I added components slowly to test and assess which parts improved and where the improvement was seen.

    Everyone using AE ought to first be on a 64bit OS, then a System with 8GB RAM min, then SSD’s for harddrive and then as fast a processor as you can afford…oh, then add a card!

    ANy and all info/real world experience put out there will only help us all!

    cheers,

    • Adam

      I know that a big + for your AE workflow are hard disks. Ofcourse I’m not going to buy CUDA card, i’m not stupid and due to lack of money I can’t afford it. I’m preparing myself and collecting money to buy some new PC and I’m still thinking ON WHAT I should bring attention the most. CPU and HDD?

  • Fragzilla

    WGSXFrank, is there any advantage in using SLI mode in After Effects or Premiere Pro CS5 in your rig?
    I just planing to buy GTX 460 and thinking about 2-way SLI

  • James

    I am considering getting the FX3800 also, specifically to speed up an After Effects CS4 project on an XP 32bit machine. Once I have completed the project I will get paid and then get a 64bit machine! My project is a 1080p 3d comp just animating a camera around still layers. Will this come under the list of things that the CUDA card will accelerate?

  • Rafael Perez

    Stephan

    Did you enabled multiprocessing on your test, for the non opengl render? My experience is different, opengl can match a quad or a hexa core workstation in render speeds.

  • Anthony

    Thanks, though the question now is is… AMD or Nvidia?

    • Adam

      AE 64 bits supports nVidia cards with CUDA.

      ATI – i dont think so

  • David

    I’m working on a macbook pro (summer2010 i7), is this video for me? I do plan on building a new desktop in the future. I downloaded the driver, my mac told me, it doesnt need it…

  • http://www.facebook.com/mike.meyerson.9 Mike Meyerson

    problem is that openGL, while a lot faster, seems to be rendering with less quality. which is very upsetting because I have a 40hr render time and that’s just not doable for my home PC.