It’s pretty hard these days to get away from motion graphics. Even the simple graphics on TV have a little push or a pull on the font. That’s where it starts, then before you know it, you need to add a little blur, then you’re compositing two shots together, pushing, pulling, blurring, motion tracking, adding a little old film noise, and the list goes on. Well that’s where it started with me the first time I ventured to open up Adobe After Effects. I kept experimenting and my videos kept getting better and my render time kept going up. So as soon as I could, I got a faster computer, then I got more RAM. Then, earlier this year, I went crazy and bought a Quad Processor G5. This would be the end-all; no more network rendering, no more waiting overnight to see if my work was perfect or not.
Well, no. It was better, but not that 2000% I was expecting.
Enter a little program called Nucleo from GridIron Software. I was first introduced to it at NAB earlier this year. What this program is designed to do is to work with the After Effects render engine and helps it fill out the capacity of all the processors in multi processor machines. Then a little while later its big brother Nucleo Pro hit the scene. When I first installed this on my machine I was a little skeptical, but after testing a couple of renders, I was blown away. Because of how much faster it was, it ruined my podcast listening schedule that I had previously gotten used to while waiting for renders to go through. Now I can actually go home and watch other people’s motion graphics on TV, rather than babysitting After Effects at my studio. And I can do that without a million-dollar render farm or 6 weeks of not being able to use my computer.
The basic concept behind both versions of the Nucleo software is pretty simple. This software duplicates the After Effects render module to every processor of a multi processor computer, which basically creates a mini render farm. With Nucleo Pro, the main added feature is you can continue working in After Effects while your program renders in the background. Wow! Now that is a feature that you can’t put a price on.
Ease of Use
When I began testing Nucleo Pro, I began, as I always do, by working through several sequences that need to be done for a project. I finished the first graphic, added it to the queue, then rather than move on to the next sequence, I went ahead and hit the render button. About 40 minutes later, the render was done! I wasn’t even finished with the next sequence. Before I left that night, I turned Nucleo Pro off and rendered the old fashioned way. Coming back in the morning the same sequence took over 3 hours to render! You really can’t get any easier to use than that. Once you have activated Nucleo Pro, you continue to use After Effects as usual and Nucleo only takes over when you hit the render button.
Depth of Options
There aren’t too many options that you can mess with in Nucleo Pro, which is a good thing. I find that a lot of plug-ins overdo it with options, which often slows down the performance of the plug-in and makes it hard to use. Nucleo doesn’t fall into this trap. It’s a performance tool and the developers have done a wonderful job in integrating it into After Effects seamlessly so you get the maximum benefit with the least interference with your workflow in After Effects.
The main Render Tool, which is the core of Nucleo Pro’s power, is in and of itself worth the price of purchasing Nucleo Pro. This part of the program is the same in both Nucleo and Nucleo Pro. The additional features of Nucleo Pro are just as impressive but personally I found them a little less useful for the workflow habits I am used to.
