I'm working on a project with After Effects CS6. All videos I'm producing are quite similar to each other (both in terms of footage, montage, duration, resolution etc.). Currently it takes 6h to render (produce H264 file) 1h of 720p footage therefore rendering multiplier is 6.

I'm interested in approximate render time with upgraded configuration (with exact same software stack) in terms of rendering multiplier, or, in simpler terms - what would be my performance gain with new configuration? I'm not quite familiar how much CPU/RAM/GPU affects video rendering performance in After Effects so any help is appreciated.

If it helps, I don't use any special effects or plugins, pretty much just overlaying some images and text on top of multiple videos.

Current configuration

  • Core2Duo E6600 @ 2.40 GHz (Dual-Core, PassMark is 1,545)
  • 4 GB of RAM
  • Nvidia GeForce 210 (512 MB)
  • OCZ Vertex 4 SSD 128 GB
  • Windows x64 with After Effects CS6

Potential new configuration

  • i7 4770 @ 3.40 GHz (Quad-Core, PassMark is 9,966)
  • 16 GB or 32 GB of RAM
  • Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 (2 GB)
  • OCZ Vertex 4 SSD 128 GB
  • Windows x64 with After Effects CS6

closed as off-topic by AJ Henderson, Saaru Lindestøkke, JoshP Nov 14 '13 at 13:50

  • This question does not appear to be about video recording and production within the scope defined in the help center.

  • As it stands this question is probably too specific for your situation to be useful in the future. You do touch on what a good question would likely be... namely how much CPU/RAM/GPU affects rendering performance. If you edit your question as such, you could probably make the determination yourself. Also, the question would remain useful in the future. – JoshP Nov 14 '13 at 13:48
  • This question appears to be off-topic because it is too specific/localized. – JoshP Nov 14 '13 at 13:50

Sadly this isn't really answerable in an exact way. There is simply too many variables at play. How much motion is in your source and final videos as well as how computationally and memory dependent your effects that you are applying will all impact the overall performance. Your best bet for getting an idea of the performance increase is to look at what is currently resource constrained on your system. Are you maxing CPU usage, memory usage, graphics card processing or disk access? Increasing whatever you are constrained by will produce a significant improvement.

Based on your current configuration though I can try to take a guess, you are really underpowered in pretty much all categories other than disk access. Dual core 2.4 ghz with 4gb of ram and a low end 512mb graphics card is nothing when it comes to rendering. I'm actually a bit surprised it manages an hour in 6 hours.

To give you an idea of a comparison, my computer is a 2.93 ghz original i7 with 12gb of ram, striped SSDs and a Radeon 6970 (which sadly can't make use of the CUDA support). I can comfortably render clips that are higher than 1080p quality with 2 pass VBR compression in just over twice the runtime. With the CUDA support on the GTX, you'd probably see even more of an improvement. For your 720p case, I make no promises, but it wouldn't surprise me if it would run faster than real time. (Not to mention the fact your experience just using the software will be infinitely better.)
