About ToonIt! speed.

ToonIt! does render slowly. For SD footage, the render for Roto Toon is about 2-3 seconds a frame. For HD footage, the render is about 12-13 seconds a frame.

ToonIt! is a quality vs. speed effect. It requires a lot of processing to create the effect and keep all the frames consistant over time. Other cartooning effects, including the Cartoon filter in our PlasmaFX plugin set, use Posterization algorithms to create a quick and dirty cartoon effect. This is pretty fast but doesn't create as nice of a look and there tends to be a lot of jitter from frame to frame.

Great performance takes awhile.

One of the main features of ToonIt! is its ability to create a smooth animation over time with very little jitter. The smoothness and consistancy of the results is really only matched by hand rotoscoping. If you compare ToonIt vs. doing this effect by hand, it's actually a very fast process, even if you have to render out a sequence over night.

Another wonderful aspect of ToonIt! is how it holds up when dealing with human faces. This is one of the most difficult kind of images to sell digitally and where most cartooning filters fall apart. ToonIt! provides pretty spectacular results and again, that is a reason that its render time is high.

Multi-processor 1.1 update.

Our version 1.1 update will speed things up dramatically if you're on a multi-processor machine. The Mac version is looking very good, but we're having a bit o' trouble with the Windows version. Sorry this has taken so long but that's the way it goes with software development sometimes.

We are aware of ToonIt's speed and are committed to improving the render times. However, we are even more firmly committed to making sure that the quality of the results are rivaled only by manual rotoscoping. This is what makes ToonIt! stand out and makes the product worth using.

Working in AE CS3?

Those of you with After Effects CS3 don't need to wait for the multi-processor version of ToonIt!. AE's multi-processor support, the Render Frames Simultaneously checkbox in the Preferences, will usually supercede ToonIt!'s MP support anyway. So if you have enough RAM for AE to render multiple frames on each of your processors you're getting as good of performance from ToonIt as we'll be able to give you. Same goes for those of you using Nucleo Pro from Gridiron Software.

CS3 multi-processing is something of a black art as to how you get AE to fully use all your processors. What is happening is there will be a separate instance of AE running on each processor. Thus, you will need enough memory for all those instances of AE. Playing around with the settings in the Memory & Cache preference section will determine how many additional processors are used by the Multi-processing preference section. You don't usually want the Memory & Cache set to the defaults if you have a multi-processor machine. Changing the memory usage to 50 or 60% will free up memory to be used by other instances of AE. Also, setting the Cache to a low amount like 10% can also affect how many processors will be used.

Of course, if you have a memory intensive project, say 4k comp with a ton of layers, setting your memory to 33% may not be a great idea. And you might want to wait until you're ready to render to change the cache settings, as a low setting will affect how much you can ram preview.

As mentioned, it's a bit of a black art which we don't fully understand, so don't take this article as the definitive guide on AE multi-processor support. These are just things we've run into while fiddling with settings on the various dualcore and quadcore machines we have sitting around the office here at the Anarchy World HQ.

Other tips for speed.

If you're not working with After Effects CS3, there are some options to change your workflow to speed things up. The ToonIt! effect looks very similar at lower resolutions as it does at full resolution. You can set everything up at half (or even quarter) resolution and then wait until you go to lunch to render out the full sequence.

If you're trying to composite other effects on top of a ToonIt layer, render out the ToonIt effect and use the render in your timeline instead of the layer with ToonIt! applied to it. You can then turn off this rendered layer and use the original layer when you do the final render.