AE Plugin Completion

Joe Clay | Mar 17, 2021

Adobe After Effects' current beta was released with MFR (Multi-frame Rendering). Since that's been missing since AE CC 2014, I was quite excited—especially as After Effects no longer needs to open separate instances in the background.

We were talking with our good friend, Agustin Eguia, and he asked if we had tried it. I had it installed, but hadn't had a moment to test it so I fired up a comp I had built earlier that day. It was kind of heavy, so I figured it'd be a good test. To my surprise, it didn't really improve over AE 2021. I rendered them both, checking out core usage. AE used about 180%-220% of my cores. Wondering if something was amiss in the setup of my new machine (more on that in the future), Sev and Agustin both rendered the same comp with similar results.

Then we thought maybe third-party effects were causing the problem. So Agustin rendered it without them, and still found similar performance between the beta and shipping versions. He eventually discovered notices on each effect saying that they were not optimized for MFR and might cause the rendering to slow down.

You might think that this would be certain esoteric effects. But they're effect plugins like Levels, Curves, even Invert. So unfortunately, I can't really test out the beta that much, because the effects that work with MFR are really limited. Someone on a forum sent me a link to the plugin support information and I became curious about how many of After Effects' plugins are MFR capable. And what about all of the other categories too, like 32-bit compatibility and GPU rendering? Well, as of today, these are the numbers.

Sev and I double-checked the list—it was quite a pain to convert to a more usable CSV—and we're pretty sure there aren't any errors, but if you see any, leave us a comment, and feel free to share. Thanks!