Render is done and closed all programs. Will check next time. It could be that it's leveraging out to the GPU too?
Reason why I can't compare AE and ME is because AE 2018 CC no longer has built in H.264 render format output. So dumb of Adobe. While Media Encoder still has it.
It’s normal - After Effects has to compile the frames linearly and many effects and processes aren’t multi-threaded so it will rarely, if ever, saturate all the cores.
You can’t exactly blame Adobe either, that’s how processors need to be worked in order to efficiently compute what is needed with modern systems. It’s not like you could find another program with the render flexibility of AE that would do the task faster.
They are in the process of rewriting AE to something even more optimised, but it’s a big job and still a little while off.
Just because it isn’t using 100%, doesn’t mean you don’t get improvements from more cores and higher clock speeds etc
Also, rendering from AE straight to MP4 was always a bad idea. You’d have the system compile the assets for each frame and then start to choke resources adding another step of transcoding the uncompressed output frame to MP4 and it would be larger than it should be and look worse as it would have been encoded linearly.
MP4 compression works non-linearly, taking into account the data before and after each frame to work out how to best compress - AE would be feeding the encoder frame one, then frame two, then frame three and also add a massive overhead to the system that’d mean the final export was slooooow, large and ugly.
The ideal workflow has always been output uncompressed or intra-frame and then transcode to delivery formats. That’d be much faster a task than just going for MP4 straight out the gate.
So yea, they removed the option as it was really inefficient and no-one should really use it.
Even rendering from AE to ME is a pretty crappy workflow. It’s fine for small transcodes, but for outputting anything beyond that is a dice roll of speed and the look of the end result.
