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Newbie Advise Please!
Hey all! Very new to this forum as I\’m just learning AE. I\’ve got the CS4 trial on my MBP and it runs pretty slow but that\’s ok as I plan on putting it on my Mac Pro when I get Production Premium Suite CS4 on Monday (ordered online).
I\’m sure I\’ll have many questions and I\’ll find most of the answers here as I have over the years on the FCP forum. For now I wanted to ask if anyone has had troubles with AE and the NVIDIA Geforce 8800 graphics card? I read on the Adobe site something about that card causing you to have to force quite or something.
Yea, ideally I would\’ve gotten a different card to begin with but didn\’t know better when I bought the machine
Mac Pro – late 2008 Octo core
OSX 10.5.7
plenty of hard drive (several, SATA and eSATA)
4 gig RAM
NVIDIA 8800Thank you in advance
Tony Brittan
Apple Certified Pro – FCP
islandshoreproductions.com -
5 Replies
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Hi Tony,
You might want to check your graphics card if it supports shader and Open_GL.. specially Open_GL. some plugins or should i say MOST of AE plugins rely on Open_Gl.
dylon
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Thanks Dylon! I checked it out and yes, it does support both. It said for the OpenGl it uses 2.1… whatever that means. It does have 512mg memory onboard as well.
I had read that a “known problem” (in the pdf on Adobe’s site) where it causes you to have to force quite AE or something like that.
Anyone out there actually using one of these cards and can you tell me if you’ve had any problems thus far?
Thank you all in advance!
Tony Brittan
Apple Certified Pro – FCP
islandshoreproductions.com -
if the 8800 is giving you problems in ae, try disabling opengl in the preview preferences. my guess is that should eliminate most issues with ae and the graphics card.
if you do have to go this route, don’t feel like you are missing out on some great aspect of ae. opengl in ae is really just to help speed up previews, and in particular just for interactions (dragging the cti in the timeline). many ae users disable it all together due to some stability issues and limitations of opengl feature support in ae. additionally, if opengl is set to always on for previews, this will disable multiprocessing for previews.
benefits of opengl in ae are such that i wouldn’t consider upgrading a graphics card just for use in ae. you’d be far better off buying more ram.
as a matter of fact, with only 4gb, you’ll really want to look into getting more ram. with ‘render multiple frames simultaneously’ enable in the multiprocessing prefs, ae will want to have 2gb of ram per core for sd projects (so 2gb x 8cores = 16gb) and 4gb per core if you want to work with hd or 32-bit comps. if you have too little ram you will starve the processors of data and multiprocessing can actually decrease performance. check otherworldcomputing.com for good ram at good prices.
note, that you can always limit the cores that ae will take over and thus limit the amount of ram that you should have… i have an 8-core mac with 12gb of ram, i limited ae to just 6 cores, to give each core 2gb to work with and everything runs very well — the other 2 cores do aid in rendering, i can see cpu usage of over 100% for every ae background process when rendering, meaning those 2 other cores are working too (to view your processes, use the activity monitor (applications>utilities)).
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Wow Kevin! I can tell that you are pretty much the guru in the AE dept. Very useful info. I can already see that this forum will be just as useful to me as the FCP forum has been. I appreciate you taking the time to explain all of that for me.
I’m extremely excited to really learn AE. It’s already giving me te same thrill as when I first started with FCP. I live for this stuff. From just the short time I’ve been playing with the trial, I find myself litterally dreaming of things I wanna do or try in AE. It seems SO versatile and I can’t wait to dig in. Already been all over the video co-pilot site.
I’ve also got a bunch of plug-INS that’ll work with ae as well as my current system so I know I’m a little ahead of the game but I can tell I’m going to end up drooling over and then buying much more.
Thank you for being kind and have an awesome weekend!
Tony Brittan
Apple Certified Pro – FCP
islandshoreproductions.com -
By the way…sorry for typos as I usually use my iPhone for reading and responding on the forums 🙂
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