AE hanging on ram previews

[Jonas Espinoza]

HD 720 29.97

we are exporting a lot of ProRes stuff, but that doesnt make a diff on in-comp ram previews does it?

am in the process of checking RAM right now

this kind of response sucks, which you guys know is half of the importance of having a fast machine – renders themselves are impressive, but it just feels like this thing has flaky memory

also – should my pairs of memory be like this? (system profiler)

RISER A – 1 1GB
RISER A – 2 1GB

RISER B – 1 2GB
RISER B – 2 2GB

[Edgard Iriarte]

I have found that the updates sometimes can bring you some issues never before encountered.
Watch out for that. Is not normal. i do RAM previews all the time with my MacBookPro and HD 1440*1080, not just graphics but footage also.

So you have a monster machine there should be no problems. Check the RAM and Memory usage.
Make the OpenGL 1/8
Have all the layers in Draft mode. See if it works.
Turn off layer maybe some of them are corrupted.
Save your project onto another disk.

Maybe these can help.
Edgard

[Edgard Iriarte]

Yes Dave but is the only way my aniamtion will play for the last 5 seconds, other than that. I am out of optiond and time. If you have a better suggetion let me know. As i said the only trouble i have with OpenGL is keeping the blend modes even if is shott off a soon as the layer shows off in the timeline with tranparency 0 it shows up. is really something.:)

[Kevin Camp]

i think what dave was after was if you are using any footage within your comps that is using a codec that used temporal compression (hdv, dvcprohd, mpeg-2, h.264, etc.). temporal compression will bog ae down. mp3 and other compressed audio can slow it down too…

you might try limiting ae to 3 processors with the preference file hack (which is what i assume you used when you mentioned limiting ae to 6 cores). this will give 2gb of ram to each core, which is supposedly the optimal amount of ram for ae’s renderer. i’m not saying you need to keep it that way, but more just to see if it helps that preview lag… you could then tweak the setting until you find what works best.

also, make sure that opengl is disabled in the preview preference (opengl rendering is not compatible with ae’s multiprocessing, so if opengl is enabled it will use that over multiprocessing to render previews).

if you have all your media on a separate media drive or array… by separate i mean on a separate bus than your main drive, so your boot drive is on the built in sata bus and you have media on a firewire or external sata card or something… then you might try enabling disk cache, setting the cache to be on the boot drive. having cached frames to draw from should improve performance in this situation.

if you have only one drive or multiple drives on the same bus, then disable disk cache, and see if that has any effect. this will help prevent data bottlenecking on the drive bus where ae is trying to read and write cached frames and read and write rendered frames through the same bus, which can effect performance…

your ram is installed the way apple would recommend for that configuration, however, since the ram on riser a does not match the size of the ram on riser b you are not getting the benefit of the interleaving between the risers… you might try removing the original 1gb sticks on riser a and move the 2gb sticks to their place. you’d only have 4gb of ram at that point, but i’d be curious how having only matched ram might effect performance…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Thad Ciechanowski]

Kevin,

DVCPRO HD does not use temporal compression. It is a 100mb version similar to DV25 or DV50. it uses intraframe compression rather than interfram.

http://www.dijitmedia.com

[Kevin Camp]

thanks thad, my mistake

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Greg Neumayer]

Activate your “info” pallet before your RAM preview so you can see it’s messages to you. I thought I was hanging, but it was just initializing the background processes. This takes a minute the first time. I also had to get used to my previews appearing in blocks of 8 frames, which at first looked like hang-time.

-Greg Neumayer

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezemotiongraphics.com

[Greg Neumayer]

Here’s a follow-up with more workaround, courtesy Anton Vanhoucke

—————————
I did some more googling and found the solution! Just turn off rendering multiple frames at once! It’s counterintuitive, but until you have 24Gb of RAM multicore rendering won’t speed you up. You need about 3Gb per core.

More here:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/434485

I now have 6Gb on an octacore G5. But until I get 24, I’ll just use 1 core for rendering…. it’s faster.

Cheers,
Anton.
————————–

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezedesign.com