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new 8 core ae system for HD animation
I’ve done a lot of searching on this forum and seen many threads about this subject but i’m curious what the opinion may be for setting up a system with my particular needs….
Most of our projects are sd graphics/animation work…We rarely use footage…Most projects originate from artwork of some sort. We have occasionally done some HD work but again its all art /animation based work.Every time we have done HD work though its been extremely painful on our older 3ghz quad core (only 5 megs of ram soon to upgrade to 8). We have a 30 second HD spot that we need to do in january and I expect us getting more HD requests in the coming year so…
I am ordering a 2.8 mhz 8 core system with an additional 8 megs of ram (will give me 10 total).
I have seen a lot of discussion about the addition of an internal/external raid to help speed things along but it sounds to me that it improves speed if i am using footage sources.
I certainly am eying that caldigit card and three terrabyte barracuda drives…I’m just not sure if it’s necessary and how much that will speed up my renders and previews in cs3…If i don’t need to spend the extra cash in this crazy economy i’d rather not.
If it’s not the raid i also considered purchasing a 10,000 rpm drive for the system and apps.I ALWAYS set up my machines with two drives..one for system and one for assets but i have seen the suggestion of a third for writing to when using the multicore machines.
Help..i’m so confused. The raid solution is pricey BUT i would get the raid if it will truly speed up my render times since time is money and it costs to have anyone sitting around waiting.
cheers
M -
5 Replies
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you may be correct that you won’t benefit too much from a fast disk array. the main reason that external storage benefits rendering is that it splits up the load on the drive bus when you have disk caching enabled.
if you are going to work with 2 internal drive that are on the same bus, the easy way to avoid performance issues is to not enable disk caching. the only negative to disabling disk caching is that when the ram cache fills up, the older frames in the ram cache will get dumped, so if they are needed later they will need to get rerendered to the cache. if you have a 1 gb cache per core, you should be able to store around 150 hd frames in the cache which should be a decent amount.
also, you can monitor the cpu performance with software like task manager (pc) or activity monitor (mac). if you start seeing that the cpus (with multiprocessing enabled) aren’t peaking near 100, then you may start looking at more ram and/or an external drive to see if that can help. you can start by just using a firewire800 drive for your rendered files and enabling disk caching to see that helps. if it does, you can then try to determine if it’s worth getting an external host adapter and drive array.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Thanks for the suggestions…We’re definitely going to need disk caching since there’s going to be a lot of previewing…I had forgotten about the whole bus load issues. An external firewire 800 drive is a very affordable solution to that problem as well… I may even have a few lying around that i can run some tests before having to buy a dedicated one.
My initial excitement about the internal Caldigit solution is fading since i have discovered if i want to use external drives as well they only work with the caldigit element drives…it still sounds like a great internal solution though…just not as expandable(for a reasonable price) as i had originally thought.
cheers
M -
Your workflow seems very similar to ours. You might want to look into Nucleo Pro 2. We use it and it saves a lot of time. I must say that is a little quirky, but once you understand how it works and its limitations, it is of great benefit.
System Setup (for a more detailed list, see my profile)
HARDWARE
Mac Pro 2 x 3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
9GB Memory
Two 16x SuperDrives
Dual-channel 2Gb Fibre Channel PCI Express card
Apple Cinema HD Display (23″ flat panel)
ATI Radeon X1900 XT Graphics Card
AJA Kona LHe SD/HD capture card
Apple Xserve Raid 5.6TBSOFTWARE
Mac OS X 10.4.11
Final Cut Pro Studio 2
After Effects CS3
Photoshop CS3
Illustrator CS3
Boris Continuum 5
Sapphire Plug Ins
Roxio Toast
Digital Anarchy Anarchist Suite
ParticleIllusion 3.0
Trapcode
Zaxwerks -
Here’s a few thoughts:
– Multicore processing in AE is highly beneficial, but Adobe recommends (and you should give it) 2GB RAM per CPU core. With 10GB RAM you would have to tweak the multicore settings to force it to use all cores, which impacts performance.
– Everything counts when you’re doing HD projects and working with many dozens of layers, scripts etc. While we can debate the specific performance gains the addition of hard drives will get you, I think that every machine should have, at minimum, three internal drives: OS Drive, Project Files Drive and Cache/Render Drive. Splitting these three vital tasks out onto their own disks makes good sense from a variety of perspectives, and since drives are so cheap there’s really no reason NOT to.
– Much like cars, every time you upgrade your computer in one area, it only reveals the flaw or bottleneck in another area. The end game is a very expensive proposition no matter how you slice it. But the one area you can infinitely expand on free of charge is your work flow. Get used to using proxies, leaner file management, raster graphics, working in half or even quarter resolution except for clean previews here and there, subcomp and render/re-import layers with 3D lighting effects or other complex animations. Each of these steps is probably worth $100 in computer upgrades/expansion.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
from what i’d been reading on this forum i thought i could get away with ten gigs of ram (8 gigs to ae) and add the extra later on… Since I’m considering not building the array i can afford the extra ram.
Smart work flow also depends on the animator and there knowledge of AE…I rarely touch AE anymore (I’m a creative director/partner) but came up very hands on using it from 1.0 when it was still owned by Cosa…I still have the box and dongle to prove it. Since computers have become so much faster i find a lot of younger animators have pretty bad work flow habits since they didn’t come up when you had to understand what good work flow was.lol. Kids these days.Of course HD changes all of this and we are now back in the stone age of renders that take hours instead of minutes again…thus me trying to set up the zippiest system i can for those HD projects.
I find myself often in the role of explaining and educating my hires in the benefits of good work flow…All of what you have listed is vital in render pig projects. 🙂
cheers
M
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