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Filed under: Motion Graphics •Post Production •Visual Effects •

Work Smarter, Not Harder: Nucleo Pro

We all love After Effects plug-ins that give exciting new looks. However, equal acclaim should be accorded those that simply give us more time. A promising new plug-in in this category is GridIron Software’s Nucleo Pro. It was in beta at the time we wrote this (August 2006), but we couldn’t wait to share it with you, and also give you a peek under the hood to understand how it works.

Overview

After Effects is a great program, but in earlier versions, it was not necessarily the most efficient when it comes time to render - especially on multiprocessor or multicore machines. Users have developed a number of ways to work around this. Some launch more than one copy of After Effects on the same computer, and to perform a “network render” that consists of just a single machine to eek out additional performance. (After Effects CS3 - released after the time this was originally written - also added the ability to use multiple processors during rendering, including RAM Previews.) Our own strategy is to have multiple computers, so one can be rendering while we continue work on another.

In late 2005, GridIron Software (perhaps best known for their X-Factor software, which manages After Effects render farms) introduced an After Effects plug-in called Nucleo, which launches multiple invisible copies of After Effects and manages those to speed up previews and renders. GridIron advertises performance gains “up to 300%”; in reality, most saw increases closer to 50% - which some were more than happy to pay for. On the downside, Nucleo takes over your computer during rendering, leaving virtually no resources for anything else to run at the same time.

Nucleo ended up being a dress rehearsal for Nucleo Pro, which delivers several features that After Effects power users have been clamoring for. In addition to the Fast Preview and Fast Render features of Nucleo, Nucleo Pro also offers Spec Preview, Spec Render, Background Render, and Commit to Disk. It also gracefully “gets out of the way” when needed, so you don’t feel like you’re losing control of your computer. Let’s dive into just what these mean…

Features

To preview your work in After Effects, you normally have to initiate a RAM Preview. After Effects renders frames at the current resolution and frame rate, loads them into RAM, and plays back the frames when the desired duration has been rendered, or when RAM is full. It makes an effort to keep in RAM rendered frames you haven’t altered; if you change an aspect of your composition, affected frames are wiped out, and have to be re-rendered next time you request a RAM Preview. There is a user preference to copy off to a drive valid frames that need to be dumped out of RAM to render new preview frames, for faster retrieval during future previews. After Effects also attempts to cache nested compositions and individual layers; users can explicitly render “proxies” for nested comps, but not for layers.

Once you initiate a Spec Preview in Nucleo Pro, it fills up your RAM Preview cache just as After Effects does, with two differences. One, after a start-up pause, it does it faster as it is using multiple invisible copies of After Effects to render in the background. Two, if you make a change that wipes out part of your RAM cache, Spec (as in “speculative”) Preview will automatically start rendering the replacement frames without you asking. As a result, the next time you ask for a RAM Preview, chances are Nucleo Pro has already rendered the frames, so there’s far less waiting. It provides several options to choose what it renders, such as an entire comp, just the work area, or around the current time location. The beta that existed at the time this was written will not Spec Preview comps that have Guide Layers; we hope that changes in a future version.

If you have a RAM Preview calculated, and then go to render a composition using Current Settings, After Effects will try to use the RAM Preview frames rather than recalculate them from scratch. However, few use Current Settings for their final render, preferring to enable features like motion blur, frame blending, or field rendering for the “real” render - which in turn requires the frames to be recalculated. As a result, we try to time renders around food and sleep breaks.

Enter Nucleo Pro’s Spec Render: Just like Spec Preview, you can have a “final” render calculated whenever you pause. If you make a change, Nucleo Pro re-renders just the changed section, and inserts that into your final render. This works even for rendering to movies rather than still sequences: Nucleo is actually caching individual rendered frames, and then stitching them together when done to create the final movie file. This can give you a great head start in calculating a final render.

There are some limitations to using Spec Render: Namely, you have to select already-created Render Settings and Output Module templates, you cannot Spec Render to multiple Output Modules, you cannot have both Spec Preview and Spec Render enabled at the same time, and as of the the time this was written Nucleo Pro doesn’t recognize changes in work area after a Spec Render starts.

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