Perfomance Of Moho and Recommended System???

[rocken]

Hello Guys,
I am curious to know whether you guys get a lag free experience when animating?
MOST IMPORTANTLY, I get a very laggy preview watching the preview on the timeline. For a long while , I never knew of turning off ALLOW FRAME SKIPPING and my God!, the playback was always awful. I also know about PREVIEW ANIMATION but it is not an efficient workflow for me .
I have a low end 2nd or 3rd gen core i3 Lenovo L512 so I presume that would be the reason but I wish to know whether it becomes a buttery smooth performance and lagless playback on higher end PC builds and if so, what do I need to look out for when getting a better system. Please, also put into considerations recommendations that is also suitable for Adobe After Effects.

[sang820]

Hello Guys,
I am curious to know whether you guys get a lag free experience when animating?
MOST IMPORTANTLY, I get a very laggy preview watching the preview on the timeline. For a long while , I never knew of turning off ALLOW FRAME SKIPPING and my God!, the playback was always awful. I also know about PREVIEW ANIMATION but it is not an efficient workflow for me .
I have a low end 2nd or 3rd gen core i3 Lenovo L512 so I presume that would be the reason but I wish to know whether it becomes a buttery smooth performance and lagless playback on higher end PC builds and if so, what do I need to look out for when getting a better system. Please, also put into considerations recommendations that is also suitable for Adobe After Effects.

hello i use pc computer,My device configuration is:

Core i9-9900k@3.60GHz
64GB DDR4 3000MHz
GeForce RTX 2080(8GB)
SSD970EVOPlus 250GB

Win10
-------------------------
I will install Moho in the default directory of the C drive, there is no lag. (unless there are too many layers and nodes)
all the best

[MrMiracle77]

I run a 2 computer setup on a small home office network. The animation computer is used for all of the prep work short of rendering:

AMD 3600X
Nvidia 1050Ti Graphics
16 GB DDR4 RAM
512 GB solid-state drive

The solid-state drive makes a huge performance difference in just about every application.

For rendering and editing, I hand my Moho files off to a second computer:

AMD A8-6X00 (I forget the exact make)
Integrated graphics
16 GB DDR3 RAM
256 GB solid-state drive
2 TB mechanical hard drive
Hitfilm Express for editing

This isn't the most ideal setup for rendering and editing because the integrated graphics eat up 2GB of the RAM and half of the memory bandwidth at times. This computer used to have the 1050Ti in it, but graphics card prices are so crazy-high right now that it just isn't practical to buy a new one for the main machine and put the 1050Ti back in the old one. But it isn't about the speed, it's about freeing-up my main computer to work on another scene while a different one is rendering.

If you're working on a single machine, though, you'll want discrete graphics for the improved memory bandwidth, among other benefits. A solid-state hard drive will also smooth things out, but video, audio, and png files will eat them up pretty quickly. The constant read/write of editing is supposedly harder on SSDs as well, making a standard hard drive as a secondary storage source useful for more than one reason.

[Greenlaw]

Moho runs very smoothly on my two computers. My desktop is an i7 with 64GB of RAM and a Geforce GTX 970 graphics card; my laptop is Xeon with 32GB of RAM and Nvidia Quadro P4000k graphics.

Both computers run Moho very speedily but in my experience, Moho should run well with a lot less power. I've done a ton of Moho work using mid-range computers before I upgraded my gear a couple of years ago. The key is to work as efficiently as possible with optimized artwork, which I still do even when using beefier computer systems.

IMO, getting a high-end graphics card isn't critical for Moho unless you're using a lot of high res bitmaps in your projects, in which case you want more RAM for the GPU. Be aware that the GPU does nothing to speed up rendering...for that, you want more system RAM and a better CPU. If you can afford a better card, it will probably help you more with compositing and video editing. (And certainly with 3D animation if you decide to go there.)

But, as mentioned, Moho should run well even on a modest computer. I'd experiment with different display options. In general, Moho runs better with GPU acceleration disabled unless you're using a lot of high-res bitmaps, in which case you want to enable GPU acceleration. Also, use lower res-images where you can, and break out your layers and composite. This can be more efficient because it requires fewer system resources to composite pre-rendered images. If you're using vector art, make sure the artwork is optimized for how you are animating the artwork.

If Moho is running unusually slow and with only certain project files, make sure you don't have any unintended negative keyframes in the project. You can check for and fix this issue using Synthsin75's Find And Delete Negative Keyframes tool: http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtop ... 4&start=15

Hope this helps.

[mionorz]

If it runs too slowly, search this forum for 'negative keyframe’ It slows down the MOHO timeline-related behavior immensely, regardless of your PC's performance.

[ggoblin]

What sort of render times are people getting?

I have an old ryzen 7 with 48gb RAM and dedicated GPU running windows, I rendered a 70 second animation yesterday.

On default settings (4 cpu) it took 7 hours, with 44% total cpu usage (36% by moho renderer) and 44% memory usage (6Gb memory by Moho renderer).

When I changed to 16 cpus (max renderer threads) it cut time in half to 3 hours 20 minutes with 100% cpu usage (70% by Moho) and same memory usage as before (6Gb by moho). With 100% cpu usage the system was not usable for anything else during the rendering (even mouse was stuttering).

A ryzen 7 has 8 cpus and 16 logical cpus. I noticed that anything above 6 cpus had Moho renderer causing system to hit 100% cpu usage so could no longer render in the background, the default 4 cpus was best for rendering in the background.

Interestingly when rendering with 4 cpus, Moho was using 92 threads, but when using 16 cpus it only used 38 threads.

In both cases GPU was not used ( 0%), does Moho not make use of GPU for rendering? During construction I know people are advised to turn off GPU acceleration as it can have strange effect on the working screen. So does that mean a dedicated GPU is not recommended for Moho?

Are these normal rendering times? I know 3d rendering can take a long time but was surprised about a 70 second 2d animation taking 7 hours.

Perhaps my project was unusual in that it included some motion blur which I know is processor intensive.

[Greenlaw]

A graphics card has no bearing on final render times. A decent card can only improve interactivity and preview animations under certain situations.

Your render times can be improved with a better CPU but this also depends on how much RAM you have available for each thread.

[Greenlaw]

Render times are subject to countless factors. A render times comparison is only meaningful when everybody renders the same benchmark project. Some good benchmark projects can be found in the Library Content that comes with Moho.

For example, Chucky's Crustacea (Import: Library: Scenes: CK Crustacea) is often used to compare render times for bitmap-heavy project. Crustacea's renders times are long enough so that the difference between different computer configurations is clear and obvious.

If you want to compare with a vector-based benchmark, I suggest rendering the Hermanos_Opazo.moho project file (C:\Program Files\Moho\Moho13.5.3\Resources\Support\Pro\Startup).

I can check what my render times are for these projects on my computer this evening.

FWIW, I tend to render from Moho in layers using Layer Comps, and then composite in another program. In the long run, this can speed up renders/re-renders, especially if the background is going to be comped in the composting program, in which case you may be rendering as few as 1 frame of the BG art in Moho. Rendering other elements (i.e., character layers) separately without the BG can be very fast in Moho, especially when you need to re-render the animation often.

[Greenlaw]

I made time to render a benchmark test during my lunchbreak. Here are my specs, results, settings and comments...

Home-built desktop computer
OS: Windows 10
CPU: Intel i7 (6 Cores)
RAM: 64GB
Graphics: Geforce GTX 970

Project file: Hermanos_Opazo.moho
Render Time: total 168 frames in 51.05 seconds

I rendered this project file using its defaults (1280 x 720) and using Moho Exporter with the following settings:



For the purpose of this test, use the exact settings above, and be sure to render to PNG Image Sequence. This should give us more accurate comparisons between different configurations and OS's.

(BTW, for some projects you can reduce the render time significantly be disabling Extra Smooth Images. This option improves the AA quality by doubling the render size and then scaling it down, but the trade off is it take up to 4x longer to render. I always leave it on since my render times are pretty fast even when it's enabled.)

I'll post the result from using my laptop computer later this evening.

[ggoblin]

Thank you for the advice Greenlaw.

I haven't tried layer comps yet.. will look into it. I will probably need them as I may need to play a mp4 video in a window as part of the animation. I noticed when I brought a video into Moho the sound disappeared and even then it slowed Moho right down (ended up hiding the video until render time).

My system has a old first gen ryzen 7 with 48gb ram ( i think they are on 6th gen now?). I rendered the same benchmark as you with same settings: 2 min 14 secs

When I upped the processors used from 4 to 8 it slightly speeded up to 1 min 35 secs. I think in such a short animation the overhead of setting up 8 cpu/threads means you dont really see the rewards.

[Greenlaw]

Yeah, it's a efficiently designed project so not too challenging a render. Still, the differences in render times are big enough to see how different computer configurations handle it.

As better benchmark project might be the Crustacea project because it can take long time to render. But that one is more of a bitmap test than a vector test.

An efficiently designed Moho project shouldn't take long to render. I'm typically careful about that so I don't worry too much about render times. I think my longest renders at work are usually just a couple of minutes for an entire sequence, unlike with 3D animation where my render times can run from a few minutes to a couple of hours per frame.