• Adobe After Effects

  After Effects only using 16% of 3.0GB RAM on my iMac ???

  Posted by Dillon Pearce on March 29, 2008 at 12:05 pm

  Hey guys,

  I just bought my new iMac 1 month ago, heres specs

  – Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.0 Ghz
  – 4gb DDR2 Ram (installed xtra 3gb yesterday)
  – ATI HD umm forgot which one
  – Mac OS X Leopard, 64bit

  It is the $1700 20″ iMac if you wanna check that up, but I don’t think its too important.

  The problem is in After Effects. I added 3gigz of ram and my OS recognizes it but After Effects only recognizes 3gb of it. It says that at the splash screen or when its rendering, and yes it is 64bit hmmm, But when I render it only uses 16% of the RAM. Yes I got everything else closed and checked the activity monitor, and like onyl a fraction of the ram is being used! I went into all the settings in AE such as memory and cache, and set to 100% and added disk cache too.

  But still only 16% max around 20% but never more! It takes like the same ammount of time to render as when I had 1gb. Can anyone help me get my After Effects using more % of RAM?

  Thanks guys, I really appreciate ANY help…

  – Dillon

  Darby Edelen replied 18 years, 5 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Darby Edelen

  March 30, 2008 at 2:34 am

  [Dillon Pearce] “I went into all the settings in AE such as memory and cache, and set to 100% and added disk cache too.”

  There are many settings in Memory & Cache, which one did you set to 100%? The first value should be set above 100% (120% is the default and works well), and the second value should not be set above about 70% (60% is the default and also works well).

  You do not want to see a very large % used during the startup screen, as this is the % used by plug-ins and such and may be unavailable for other uses. During renders the % used should vary depending on the complexity and length of the render.

  The bottom line is that you don’t want to be using all of your RAM, because then you run a higher risk of errors and poor performance (using paging files/virtual memory, and less RAM for your system to use). You want more RAM available to AE so that it can use that RAM as is necessary, but using a high percentage of that RAM during a render does not mean better performance… it usually means overall poorer performance.

  Darby Edelen
  Designer
  Left Coast Digital
  Santa Cruz, CA

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