Hanlding EXR too slow

[mmrender]

Hello,
I post this question in some AE forums but I´d like to hear from the compositor experts around here. Vray community is amazing

Today I was testing how would be working in AE with EXR at float and I found the handling of this type of file very slow. I did a quick test by converting the 32bit EXR sequence to 32bit TIFF one, put them both in a two diferent composition in AE and test how fast I can preview them and manipulate. Both footage were around 600MB but the TIFF one responds really fast, almost in real time while the EXR took around 15 min to RAM to preview.
(More info: the EXR are not including any extra layer, just RGB+alpha. Also, I intalled the ProEXR with any change).

Someone else noticed that? Is it any workaround or settings I should use, or it is the normal behavior?

Thanks,
Manuel

[vlado]

How do you generate the .exr files? There are two types of these depending on how the data is laid out in the file: scanline EXR files and tiled EXR files. Some programs are slow to deal with the tiled version while being very fast with the scanline files (e.g. Nuke). For other programs (like Fusion), this does not matter.

Best regards,
Vlado

[mmrender]

This example was done with EXR generared in scanline. I tried in a different exercice with a sequence generated by vray VFB saved as .exr (in the place were normally you save vrimg) but on that I included some layers to expand later with ProEXR in AE. The frames were around 45MB each and the handling in AE was terrible. Maybe I can try again from vray VFB without extra layers.

Thanks for the info.

[dcullipher]

We use AE all the time with EXRs and it is painful. We are probably switching to Fusion as Nuke has a similar problem. Although some companies have a process where they render then bring into Nuke then convert to scanline exr to get speed back. I just don't like that extra step and I wanna still lean on my AE plugins so we will probably go with fusion.

[Shimakaze]

How do you generate the .exr files? There are two types of these depending on how the data is laid out in the file: scanline EXR files and tiled EXR files. Some programs are slow to deal with the tiled version while being very fast with the scanline files (e.g. Nuke). For other programs (like Fusion), this does not matter.

Best regards,
Vlado

Am I correct in thinking that if you save as vrimg files (that are tiled) and convert those to exr files they are output as scanline?

[instinct]

We use AE all the time with EXRs and it is painful. We are probably switching to Fusion as Nuke has a similar problem. Although some companies have a process where they render then bring into Nuke then convert to scanline exr to get speed back. I just don't like that extra step and I wanna still lean on my AE plugins so we will probably go with fusion.

What Problem ? That reading Tiled exr's is slower then scanline based ones ? That's true for all apps as it's by design i'd say. Tiled EXRs have the buckets in arbitrary order, hence there's a lot of jumping within the file when reading it wich is obviously slower then blindly reading scanlines as needed. Nuke is the only tool i know that is able to properly handle multichannel EXRs.

Kind Regards,
Thorsten

[vlado]

Am I correct in thinking that if you save as vrimg files (that are tiled) and convert those to exr files they are output as scanline?

Yep, this is correct. vrimg2exr always produces scanline EXR files.

Best regards,
Vlado

[mmrender]

I´ve heard somewhere else that a working pipeline to bring float footage to AE could be to convert the exr to 32 Bit TIFF. But I don´t know if this would be a good practice and how to do the conversion.