Burning Question: What is Multi-Frame Rendering in After Effects?

Multi-Frame Rendering, or MFR, is a HUGE under-the-hood update that so After Effects users have been clamoring for years. The beta came out in March and was officially released today.

To put it simply, you can render a lot faster by just updating your software to After Effects 22.0.  According to the hardware video, below, “Even a modest system should see a 150-200% increase in performance, with higher-end systems seeing up to a 450% increase!” with MFR! Now, that’s impressive, don’t you think?

To put it simply, Multi-Frame Rendering allows After Effects to use multi-core CPUs, speeding up exports, by rendering in parallel.

The video below gives an overall look at Multi-Frame Rendering, and we’ll have some specifics, such as how to enable Multi-Frame Rendering, plugin issues you may encounter, and more.

By the way, we’ll update this article with new tutorials and links as we get them.

Multi-Frame Rendering Overview

How to Enable or Disable Multi-Frame Rendering

1. First, you need to make sure that you’ve updated After Effects to version 22.0. Open your Adobe Creative Cloud App and update it.
   
2. At the top menu, go to After Effects > Preferences > Memory & Performance (Mac) or File > Preferences > Memory & Performance (Windows).
   
3. On the Memory & Performance tab, go to the Performance section. Check Multi-Frame Rendering to enable it. Conversely, uncheck the box next to Multi-Frame Rendering to disable it.
   

Plugin Issues you May Encounter

Plugins will need to be updated to work with Multi-Frame Rendering. The SDK was available months ago so many plugins are ready to take advantage of MFR. For example, the most recent releases of RenderGarden, Boris FX, Red Giant, and RE:Vision Effects fully support MFR.

See which plugins are updated to support MFR: Multi-Frame Rendering Support List

If you run into issues, follow the instructions above to disable MFR.

How to Choose the Best Hardware for Multi-Frame Rendering

Matt from Puget Systems gives his opinions on the best hardware for MFR.