After Effects Scripts

Throttle

By lloydalvarez August 14, 2008
6,209 Downloads

Rating = 52 votes

Throttle

With the 8.0.2 update After Effects introduced 2 very important but not very well publicized or easy to modify preferences that are crucial to proper throttling of AE, so I updated Throttle to include these prefs to make them easy to access and modify. Secondly i removed the purge option since I learned that there is a keyboard shortcut for Purge: Ctrl-Alt-/ (on number pad) or Cmd-Option-/ on mac. The 2 prefs are the ability to limit the number of processes used when multi-processing is on. This becomes important on multi-core machines that don’t have at least 2gb of ram per core. According to the 8.0.2 release notes: “[Fixed] Multiprocessing performance issues with multi-core machines, especially high-end 8-core hardware. When all 8 cores try to render a complex or memory intensive composition with Render Mutliple Frames Simultaneously, the application can become memory starved if each process has insufficient memory. For better performance on an 8-core machine with 8GB RAM, for example, change the number of processes from “0″ setting to “4″ . This restricts multiprocessing with RenderMultiple Frames Simultaneously to 4 cores, each getting approximately 2GB of RAM.” [note: “0″ means use all available processes] Unfortunately this pref only controls the number of processes used by the main AE application and therefore does not apply to aerender which is what BG Renderer uses, so if you use BG Renderer and want to use MP successfully you might want to stock up on some RAM. The second pref is the ability to let After Effects continue rendering the Comp frame while you switch away to another application. They call this “Allow Idle Rendering”. Both of these prefs are only accessible by manually opening the AE prefs file in a text editor and knowing how to look and change the pref. Throttle makes this easily accessible from within AE.

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