Nucleo Pro

Because of the lack of multi-threading in After Effects and its plug-ins, you get a poor return from it on today’s multi-CPU machines. The elegant solution to this is Gridiron’s Nucleo, which utilises multiple After Effects rendercores to maximise every bit of power at your disposal, speeding up rendering and previews by anything from ten to 150 per cent, depending on your set-up – the more idle the CPUs, the more noticeable the speed-up.

This new Pro version not only improves your final render times, but can also perform background rendering, speed up RAM previews, commit layers to disk and even run ‘speculative’ renders on an on-going project, where Nucleo Pro is continually rendering in the background. So you can have completed elements rendering out ready for inclusion in your comp, or just have Nucleo Pro perform a final render as you work.

With this, there are really just two questions to ask: does it work and do I really need it? Yes, Nucleo Pro works brilliantly. It’s simple to install and nicely integrated into After Effects.

On our Quad G5 Mac, After Effects made poor use of the four processors; with Activity Monitor running, this was apparent as the bars on the graph fluctuated in turn. However, with Nucleo Pro invoked, it worked pretty much full tilt across the board with an accompanying reduction in render times.

With multi-core systems rapidly becoming the norm, Nucleo Pro’s value will increase. Using the ‘time is money’ equation, it’s hard to see how motion graphics professionals wouldn’t benefit from Nucleo Pro.