Does Animate use multiple cores?

Does Animate use all of the cores of a multi-core processor, say a Core 2 Duo?

As far as I know, it does… 4-cores (or 8 threads, if Hyper-Threading is available)
If you like, here is a comparison Activity Monitor screenshot, during render between
Studio 5, Animate 2, Final Cut Express 3.5 and Cinema 4D 11…
http://img844.imageshack.us/img844/8145/activitymonitor.jpg

Regards
Nolan

Thanks. That is good news. I never considered using the resource monitor to check :confused:



So Animate can only go up to 2 threads? As in getting a CPU with 4 or more threads is pointless if you don’t have Pro because it won’t use them?



Is this a matter of optimization or the fact that more threads can’t really offer 2D animation much? What I’m saying is that if a hypothetical Animate 3 was released in the not so distant future, could it be coded to handle more cores and threads better? Or would it be completely pointless?

So what I got from this thread: Animate 2 can only use up to 2 threads at once. This is solely due to the architecture of the rendering software. Animate PRO however can be coded to use more, hence the “PRO”, but even then so 4 threads is pretty much standard in this day in age and the jump from 4 to 8 is hardly significant unless you are doing something absolutely insane.

So the answer to the OP’s question would be: No, but PRO does. Even then so your quadcore of today can comfortably handle anything you’ll throw at it. No reason to get eight threaded or six core overkill.

Animate and Animate Pro do take advantage of multi-threading. The software as a whole runs on 4 or 5 threads - one thread for sound, etc. so that different tasks are taking place at the same time on different threads. However we don’t use up 100% of any of those threads.

When it comes to rendering, we cannot render more than one tvg at a time. But what can be done is effects that don’t depend on each other can be rendered simultaneously on different threads. This depends highly on how the scene is constructed. In Animate Pro, if you have a complicated Network view with many independent effects, those could be rendered independently. If you have one effect that follows another effect, however, then one needs to be finished first before the next one can be rendered.

In Animate, it’s configured to take up to 2 threads for rendering. In Animate Pro you can configure the number of threads. However as I mentioned before, the amount that it can take advantage of this really depends on the construction of the scene, and differs a lot for each scene.

Usually there’s a big difference between rendering on 1 thread and 2 threads. Then when you go from 2 to 4 there is also some improvement - but not as dramatic an improvement as 1 to 2. Between 4 threads and 8 threads usually not much difference in render time is noted.

Hope that was informative!

~Lilly

Yes it is true that Animate cannot take advantage of more than 2 cores.

Yes it is also true that at the moment it is not possible to take advantage of more than that. The reason lies in how the rendering is done under the hood, in terms of taking the tvgs and rendering the effects and whatnot, as I mentioned before - effects that take place simultaneously but are not connected to one another can be rendered at the same time. In order to set up your effects in this fashion, however, you would have to have Animate Pro, in order to set up the network. In animate, because you’re limited to doing your effects in the timeline only, there’s little that can be done to change the configuration.

I will double-check on whether there is anything that can be done to improve the rendering in Animate 3 before I give a definitive answer on this one - but as far as I understand it’s due to the architecture itself. They are always making improvements to rendering however I’m not sure whether these improvements would affect multithreading.

~Lilly

Exactly.

~Lilly