AE CS3 and NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT Graphics Card help

[Kevin Camp]

don’t worry about the graphics card, since you have opengl disabled, your not using the gpu for processing your previews (and i’m not saying you should enable opengl, i think your usually better off without it).

as far as the ram cache goes, i’d set both the max ram usage and max ram cache back to around the defaults (max ram:120, max cache:60). if you have your media files and renders on a separate external drive, enable disk caching, if everything is on the internal drive(s) then your probably better off without disk caching.

another thing you might try is the preference hack (this is actually from by adobe, so it is safe). what this will do is limit the number of cores to use in ‘rendering multiple frames simultaneously’ to give them the optimal amount of ram (2gb):

1. Quit After Effects.

2. Open the After Effects text preferences file, Adobe After Effects 8.0 Prefs.txt, located in the following folder: Mac OS: Users//Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects/8.0

3. Find the [‘MP’] section. (use ‘find’ to find ‘mp’ whole word)

4. Change the “MaxNumberOfProcesses” value to “4”. you want this to be the amount of ram divided by 2.

5. Save and close the preferences file.

ae will still use the other 4 cores to help in rendering, it just won’t restrict the amount of ram available to the cores for caching frames…

another thing you should do, is open the activity monitor (applications/utilities), then try a ram preview in ae. you’ll be able to see the aeselflink processes (ae’s multiprocessing engines). you should see 4 of them open up. after they get going you should see the cpu numbers get well over 100%. this shows that the other 4 cores are getting involved and that data is getting to them quick enough for them to work well.

if you are routinely seeing numbers well under 100%, then there is a problem with them getting data fast enough to process effectively. i’ve found that with 8-cores processing, the hard drive bus is often the reason, particularly if the comps use several hd clips composited together. the drives just can’t keep up with the demand for data by the cpus.

if that’s the case, you’ll want to look into a fast disk array and pci host adapter…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Ron Davis]

Thanks for the quick response.

I’m actually working of a RAID so the disk array hopefully shouldn’t be an issue. The thing is that I was expecting to get significant increases in speed on this new Mac but that hasn’t happened so far, so maybe I shouldn’t be expecting speeds to increase 10 folds.

Is their any chance that converting a complex project from AE 7 to AE CS3 can create slowdown since the project want conceived in CS3?

Anyhow thank you very much for the advice, I will try implementing everything you listed and see how it goes from their. I just really want to rule out the issue that the graphics card can be causing these issues? Are certain graphics cards that would be more recommended then others for AE CS3?

Many Thanks again

[Kevin Camp]

i should note that in my suggestion to limit the number of cores, i had thought you mentioned you had an 8-core mac, after rereading, you stated a quad-core, so i don’t think you would need to do the pref hack… sorry for any confusion.

but onto your question…

ae doesn’t really use opengl very well, so any improvements you make to your graphics card won’t have a tremendous effect of preview or interaction speed, particularly if you have multiple cores…

ae’s opengl render engine and it’s multiprocessing engine are not compatible (at least in cs3)… meaning you can only use one or the other, not both together. since ae’s opengl rendering isn’t as full featured as it could be, plus it is rather flakey and frequently the cause for crashes or unusual behavior, i would recommend disabling opengl all together. also, by disabling opengl, you will allow ae to use multiprocessing for rendering previews, which, with 8 cores, is probably faster anyway.

you should be seeing noticeable performance gains from a g5 with ae7 and a 4-core mac with cs3… if your g5 was a dual core and both machines had the same cpu speed, you should see at least 2x better performance on the macpro, and i some cases 4x faster, or a bit more due to faster ram bus speeds.

since you have an external raid, you should go ahead and enable disk caching, set it to use the main system drive and you can up the size from the default 2000mb to around 10,000mb. i would also recommend that you keep the ram cache and ram usage settings around the default values, unless you are having problems…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Darby Edelen]

[Kevin Camp] “also, by disabling opengl, you will allow ae to use multiprocessing for rendering previews, which, with 8 cores, is probably faster anyway.”

CPU rendering is definitely more predictable, but OpenGL rendering for many tasks is much faster than even an 8 core machine (depending on your GPU of course).

It’s definitely a trade off in terms of compatibility/stability and performance… I wish it weren’t 🙂

Darby Edelen

[Ron Davis]

Thanks for all the great info.

You were right the first time, I do indeed have an 8core Mac, I accidentally typed quadcore when I should have put 2 x quadcore.

Anyhow I did the preference hack and changed the MaxNumberOfProcesses from 0 to 4. In my activity monitor I now have 4 multiprocessing engines instead of 8 and each one is giving me a CPU reading ranging from 0.5 to 0.8 while the main CPU ranges from 100 to 200. I’m thinking that’s pretty good, after doing allot of tweaking the speeds are getting a little better.

Does everything I did here sound correct?

Here’s a question I have, could it be that taking a consolidated AE7 project with dozens of HD layers and then converting it to CS3 could result in sluggish performance since the project wasn’t conceived in CS3. Could it be that if the project was created in CS3 from scratch then speeds would be better?

Many thanks in advance again.

[Kevin Camp]

[Ron Davis] “Here’s a question I have, could it be that taking a consolidated AE7 project with dozens of HD layers and then converting it to CS3 could result in sluggish performance since the project wasn’t conceived in CS3. Could it be that if the project was created in CS3 from scratch then speeds would be better?”

i don’t think so, unless you were forcing cs3 to run as powerpc to gain access to older third party effects or something… if you don’t know what i’m talking about then, no worries, your running it as intel native… you would need to select the ae application and choose file>get info, then check an option to run ae as a rosetta app, essentially, run the powerpc version on an intel mac.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Ron Davis]

Thanks for the feedback

Just to be sure, since i did the preference hack and changed the MaxNumberOfProcesses from 0 to 4 is it still recomended to also have multiprocessing enabled?

Many Thanks