• Adobe After Effects

  Slow renders, After effects_CS5_OSX 10.6.5

  Posted by Ben Lindemuth on April 6, 2011 at 6:17 pm

  Hey there all,

  Tried searching to diagnose problem, was hoping someone could weigh in.

  My render’s have been going extremely slow lately. I am working on a documentary, doing additional editing and graphics. When I first started on this system, I did not notice any performance issues, but as we have moved forward, render times have slowly decreased, and as of late a few elements that I cue will not even begin to render out. I have another single core system at home that renders out twice to three times as fast.

  The only thing that I could think of is that we have been adding on additonal storage for extra media, however I’m not sure how that could affect AFX render times. Right now we have a 12TB Internal Raid as well as an external 4TB graid drive. OS is on an external 1tb Graid.

  Here are my system specs – MACPRO 2009 – Dual 2.26 – 8GB Ram – RADEON 4870_OSX 10.6.5_CS5

  I have used Tech Tool Pro to defrag and repair my os drive.

  Any Ideas?
  Apologies in advance if I’m missing something, or this is obvious.

  Ben Lindemuth replied 15 years, 4 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Rich Kaelin

  April 6, 2011 at 11:57 pm

  I have been experiencing similar problems. At this moment I am doing a render, and I did several experiments for render times. I run dual quad (8 x 3.06GZ) with 12 GB RAM and raid arrays. When I turned multi-processing off, render times went up 4x, so I experimented and settled on 4 processors at 1.5 GB RAM each, which seemed to yield the best time. I have found that different effects utilize processors and RAM in different ways, so I have yet to settle on what settings are best.

  I will say that Macs do get bogged down after a while. A gentleman named Rafael gave me some advice on system maintenance a while back when FCP was crashing/bogging. It Helped a lot. It is a good idea to really “clean house” now and then. I think it is time for me to do it again. Here is the link to his post:
  https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/1105933

  In my view, it is a good Idea to just clean out and even reload from scratch, OS and all, now and then. The type of work we do generates a lot of files and junk that gets hard to keep track of and get rid of. The average Mac user does not have these issues. Also, even though it is a Mac, we (or at least I) sometimes install stuff that will run in background and slow things down, and then I become unaware that they are there and I do not need them.

  I hope others post advice on this, I could use it, I am far from an expert, just speaking from my experiences. Also (and this is from experience as well) a failing hard drive, and sometimes they still work when they are on the way out, will really slow things down.

  Rich Kaelin
  Kaelin Motion Production Services
  https://kaelinmotion.com
  New York
• 

  Ben Lindemuth

  April 8, 2011 at 5:47 pm

  Thanks for the tips – I’ll check try to defrag, and rebuild my system.

  Very strange. I just did a test render of this linked project – and it took 10 minutes to render with multi processing disabled. And then I moved over to a cloned machine of mine – exactly the same setup – and the same exact render took 2 minutes.

  https://www.box.net/shared/njnlggyro2

  I think a fresh install is warranted.

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