ProVideo Coalition.com: Creating Motion Graphics: Keyframes by Chris & Trish Meyer

As compensation, Nucleo Pro also offers Background Render. With this feature, you set up a normal After Effects Render Queue - which can contain custom settings, multiple comps, and multiple Output Modules per comp - and then tell Nucleo Pro to start rendering this in the background. Unlike Spec Render, changes to your comps at this point will not cause Nucleo Pro to start over; it will render your comps in their state as of the time you started the background render. As a result, not only can you continue working on the comps (say, to create variations on a theme), you can even open another After Effects project and work on that while the previous project renders.

Finally, Nucleo Pro also offers a Commit to Disk feature, which allows you to render just selected layers in a comp to disk. Nucleo will render these layers to their own proxy movie, insert that result in your current timeline, and turn off the layers it replaces. This allows you to still make changes to the cached layers.

Under the Hood

As mentioned, the way Nucleo Pro pulls all this off is by launching multiple invisible copies of After Effects in the background, and using those for processing (a similar technique is used by After Effects CS3). In the case of a quad processor or core machine, Nucleo Pro will try to launch up to five invisible copies of AE in addition to the one you are working in: one per CPU, and an additional “encoding” copy (which converts cached frames into a movie). Nucleo Pro manages what each copy does, as well as RAM allocations. Given free rein, Nucleo Pro will use as much as 21 gigs of RAM on a quad machine! If you don’t have enough RAM, Nucleo Pro will scale how many additional copies of AE it launches. Spec Preview and Spec Render also benefit from having an additional fast drive to cache to. You will get some of Nucleo Pro’s benefits even on a single CPU machine. And since it’s copies of After Effects - not Nucleo Pro - that’s rendering the pixels, you don’t have to worry about different frames looking different.

As with all things in life, there are limitations to Nucleo Pro. For example, plug-ins, which prevent multiple copies from running at once, may give render errors. GridIron is working with vendors to remedy these problems; one workaround is to install “render slave” versions of these plug-ins when available. Additionally, plug-ins that work across multiple frames may render more slowly. There are also some special cases where using Nucleo Pro will cause a project to start up more slowly, or will take some time to clean up RAM after intensive renders; more complex projects also take longer before they start a Spec Preview, Spec Render, or Background Render as they need time to be loaded into the background copies of After Effects. To help Nucleo Pro keep all of the caches and copies of After Effects coordinated, it is also a good idea to not change things like activated fonts while After Effects is open, and to quit Nucleo Pro processes such as background renders before quitting After Effects itself.

Overall, it’s nice when a third party company obviously monitors the requests of users when developing a new product. Nucleo Pro may not give your graphics a sexy new look, but anything that gives us back more time is pretty sexy to us.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Work Smarter, Not Harder: Nucleo Pro

GridIron Software’s Nucleo Pro renders After Effects frames while you’re still working.

Nucleo Pro has its own Background Render Queue, which allows you to open and work in a new project while Nucleo Pro renders a different project.

Under the Hood