• Adobe After Effects

  External HD for AFX

  Posted by Andrew Riss on February 15, 2011 at 4:23 pm

  I tried looking the answer to this question but couldnt find it. I am scheduled to work on site as an AFX artist.

  I was wondering if it is worth bringing my new external 2t RAID drive or just a normal FW drive?
  Are there advantages to working from a RAID in AFX?

  Or does AFX rely mostly on the processor and RAM?

  Walter Soyka replied 15 years, 5 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Walter Soyka

  February 15, 2011 at 4:49 pm

  [Andrew Riss] “Or does AFX rely mostly on the processor and RAM?”

  Totally depends on your project and workflow. For most people working with little footage and lots of effects, AE is bound by the processor and RAM, and the speed of the disk has little impact.

  However, if you’re working with many multiple footage items in a single comp, or if you like to pre-render or proxy to image sequences to speed up your workflow, your project could quickly become disk-bound. If that’s the case, the RAID could speed things up.

  I recommend a monitoring tool like MenuMeters [link] to let you see how your system is performing during a render. You could also just watch Activity Monitor on a Mac or Task Manager on Windows. If you see a lot of disk activity but not a lot of memory or CPU activity, then your render is probably disk-bound.

  Walter Soyka
  Principal & Designer at Keen Live
  Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
  RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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