By: Erik Vlietinck
Mon, October 29, 2007 - 6:47:00

http://www.gridironsoftware.com
Score:

Nucleo Pro 2 is an evolutionary upgrade from the previous version, but it’s an important one. Version 2 adds pre-composition proxies and the ability to manage the rendering of projects from 3D applications such as Maya, Cinema 4D, LightWave, Apple Shake, and After Effects CS3 of course.

After Effects users will have to render 3D scenes often when working on a project and they will now be able to set the scene rendering and go back to work in After Effects CS3. I immediately wondered why GridIron hasn’t added e-on Software’s Vue 6 Infinite to the list --Vue being used in motion pictures such as Pirates of the Carribean and all, but then again, you can use Vue from within the supported applications, so indrectly, Nucleo Pro 2 supports rendering Vue scenes as well.

I tested Nucleo Pro 2 with Cinema 4D R10 on a Quad Core Mac Pro with 2GB RAM, and the memory proved to be the lower limit to run Nucleo Pro 2 smoothly along with After Effects. Occasionally, After Effects CS3 would become less than responsive while Nucleo Pro 2 was rendering --while it was making excellent use of my disks for swapping data in and out of memory.

After Effects CS3 has multi-processor support, so my first question was why I should use Nucleo Pro 2 at all. The answer is that After Effects CS3’s support is limited to faster preview and rendering without any of the background and speculative rendering and preview capabilities that Nucleo Pro 2 has to offer.

Pre-Comp Proxies

In many respects, Nucleo Pro 2 makes life easier for an After Effects CS3 user. Spec-Render, for example, allows you to continuously render a composition all the while you’re creating it. Only modified frames will be re-rendered when you change them.

Commit to Disk lets you commit finished layers to disk so that when the render is complete, the selected layers are non-destructively replaced with the rendered footage.

Pre-composition proxies are new to Nucleo Pro 2. They are a new way of keeping your After Effects proxies cached and up-to-date. All you do is tag a composition for proxying and Nucleo Pro 2 will render it in the background and use the rendered output as the proxy.

Personally, I was most interesting in the background rendering of one of the supported 3D projects, so I tested this new feature with Cinema 4D R10 and with Apple Shake. The first test failed completely. Nucleo Pro 2 started rendering all right, but consumed so much CPU power that the whole system froze up, except for the rendering queue.

That wasn’t too impressive, but I suspected some background process from another application to be responsible, so I killed all processes, restarted the machine and tested again. This time I only had After Effects and Nucleo Pro open. And this time it worked. The rendering of the Cinema 4D cube with shader took a couple of seconds to finish, and during that time After Effects remained quite responsive.

What I don’t understand, though, is why you should have to run Nucleo Pro 2 as a plug-in to After Effects. If it can render Cinema 4D and even Shake --if you’re using Shake, do you still need After Effects?-- why not make it into a stand-alone application and have these files render by drag-and-drop --the same way you start such a rendering process now.

It must be possible to make it into a stand-alone application; the Support Tool is a stand-alone problem fixer, so why not Nucleo Pro 2 itself? Perhaps my remark doesn’t make sense as I don’t often render compositions, but I did notice that rendering a Shake composition will open the Shake flipbook automatically. You will then see --by default on top of your After Effects window-- the composition being rendered frame by frame.

Regardless, I found Nucleo Pro 2 to offer a speedy and far more informative alternative to After Effects’ built-in rendering capabilities. And it works great with supported 3D applications too.