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More Ram = More Better, right?
OK, so I installed another 4 gigs of ram, hoping my FCP, AE, PS, Etc. projects would zip right along to the finish line at blazing speed. Not so. So I’m sure there’s a configuration or preference setting I need to change, right?
Case study #558548905: I rendered a 30 second animation in AE last week prior to installing the new stuff. Render time: 3+ hours. I installed the new stuff and, as a test, re-rendered the same project yesterday. Render time: 3+ hours. In observing the ram use in the render que, it indicates using 2047mb. The box came with 2 gigs installed. What’s wrong with this picture?Couldn’t find anything in the AE settings, G5 settings (it reads the ram, btw) that allows change to occur. I’m looking here because I’m not sure where else to look… Also posted in a couple of the Apple threads, if that’s all right…
Thoughts? Thanks.
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17 Replies
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In your case you’re probably not seeing any improvement because your limited by the processing speed of your CPU. The ram just acts as a place to store open compositions, graphics and temporary render data instead of having to I/O them from disk all the time.
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Thanks Tory,
I’m running a quad 2.5GHz mac, which I should have stated in the post. No other programs/projects seem to be running while the rendering is going on. What else can I check?
Thanks,
Make money (and love, of course) not war…
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there are a few things we don’t know about your setup…
1. how many cores is you g5?
2. are you using ae cs3?as tory mentioned, processing speed is the primary factor in render speed. ram can improve performance by decreasing the use of ram disk/disk caching and providing a constant stream of data to the processors.
however, if you have cs3 or a render agent like nucleo you can get more processing cores to render. one of the main requirements in being able to effectively use multiple processors is more ram. since you have 6gb of ram, you should be able to get as many as 4 cores to work, but you need to enable it in the ae multiprocessing preference (note, nucleo is a different procedure). enabling that should give you better performance.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Thanks Kevin,
The machine has 4 cores and 8 gigs. I’m using AE 6.5. Does that mean I can’t get the other 3 to work?
Make money (and love, of course) not war…
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there are a handful of effects in 6.5 that are multiprocessor aware, but most are not, and neither is the render engine. you might look into nucleo. it will allow 6.5 to render using multiple processors. the word on the street is that it is better at multiprocessing than cs3 and people swear by it, but, honestly, i’ve never used it.
aharon rabinowitz did a review of nucleo and nucleo pro last year if you want to learn more about how it works. click on his face on the ae forum page, then search the page for ‘nucleo’ and you’ll find it. i believe you can download a free trial of nucleo too.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
I just got the same advice from the folks over on the apple thread about nucleo so it looks like my answer will be another $50 bucks. Sure hope my numbers come up tonight:}
Really appreciate all your help.
Make money (and love, of course) not war…
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I’m not sure what your 30sec comp involves, but you might want to step it up to a MacPro and CS3. I know it’s not a great analogy, but a year ago I was running a dual G4 and AE 5.5. I did some 30 second projects that were pretty deep in precomps and 3D layers. They were taking 4+ hours each. Some longer.
When I got CS3 and my mac pro, (just a dual dualcore 2 gig with the stock vid card) I rerendered some of those 4 hour projects to see the speed difference. They were more like 5-15 minutes. Actually, I think those tests were with AE 5.5 on the Mac Pro under rosetta! I need to run them again in CS3.
The G5 is a big step from a dual g4. But still, I’m rendering an extremely intense nested, nested, nested, nested project that’s :35 seconds right now and the renders are 35 minutes for 35 seconds. Everything is 720p30. I only have 3 gigs of RAM, and I keep FCP open to check completed renders while AE is still rendering in the background. Sometimes I still have PS and Ai open, plus my mail, plus Safari of course. It never even makes a difference in the render time. I also monitor the renders out the firewire port to an SD NTSC monitor. AE has to do another calculation to spit it out in DV. All this, and I check the render que and it says it’s using 59% of 3 gigs of RAM. And, I haven’t setup the multi processor rendering. I’ve read tests that don’t show the intels to be much faster than the same number of same ghz ppcs, but I find it to be just amazing for my work. Go intel.
Just how intense is the 30sec project you’re rendering anyway?
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Thanks Bret,
I’m afraid I’m going to have to sell a lot of those 30 second spots before another upgrade takes place. Saving my pennies for that Nucleo program I’m reading about. Although, last night I downloaded the trial and it crashed AE. Now AE won’t even open without crashing. Go figure. If you have a magic bullet in your arsenal I’d take it; right between the eyes…
Make money (and love, of course) not war…
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Good news. Trashing the preferences allowed for a successful startup on AE. So at least I haven’t lost any more ground…
Make money (and love, of course) not war…
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I had a similar post to this one a few weeks back when I went from 3 Gigs of memory to 11 Gigs in my Intel Xeon 2-dual 2.4 machine.
I was very surprised to see that the program wasn’t using much more memory at all, although I did see a slight speed increase.
Someone finally explained that that since the program is 32 bit, it will never address more than 3 Gigs of memory at all.
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/926755
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