AE on new Mac Pro Quad-Core painfully slow

[Russ Andersson]

Just a quick thought—-did you transfer everything from your old machine? Perhaps you have an older PowerPC-only AE in place? If so then the new Mac Pro will be running using Rosetta and poor performance is to be expected. Cure would be to re-install a current Universal version of AE.

[Eric Ransdell]

No, we did a clean install of everything, including AE from the discs. Any other thoughts on what this might be?

[Kevin Camp]

i would go ahead and set the preference file’s max processors values back to the default ‘0’. you would only need to use that hack to limit the number of cores used, not to tell ae to use all of them, it will try to do that automatically. i’m not sure it would be causing any prblems, but it’s only necessary if you wan to prevent ae from using all 8 cores.

you might also set the max ram back the to the default 60% and disable disk cache. see if that has any effect on the render/preview speed. (adobe recommends not exceeding 60% max ram cache, and disk cache with only one hard drive as boot and media may reduce performance).

are you seeing slow downs on all comps, or just specific comps? it may be taht you are using footage in some of the comps that has temporal compression (like hdv, mpeg, dvcprohd, h.264…). that will give ae fits.

also, as russ mentions, you are not running ae under rosetta, right? you can check that by selecting the application in the finder, then choosing file>get info. there is a check box option to runn the application under rosetta. make sure that is unchecked, or you will take a performance hit. on occasion it is useful to use this option to gain acces to older powerpc only effects and codecs, but you would rather not have to run ae that way too often, or it will run about as fast as your g5.

at work we have a newer 8-core macpro (12gb), a 4-core macpro (6gb), and dual g5 (4gb), and the render speeds are night and day between each of them. i didn’t get too fancy with the ram cache settings, and use a modest disk cache and separate sata media drives for each. onthe mcapros i did limite the number of cores with the preference hack to a ratio of 2gb of ram per core, and everyting works quite well for us.

so i hope we can get yours working well for you too…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Ed Sully]

Actually the problem is quite simple, you bought a mac.

The best solution is to build yourself a PC. 9 out of 10 doctors recommend it for removing the fisher price taint of the mac.

[Colin Mcquillan]

[ed sully] “Actually the problem is quite simple, you bought a mac. “

ha,, still sour-apples about you’re impossible problem of FCP altering your source files?

Colin McQuillan
Van. B.C.

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

Some of the other responses to your post may be more on the money, but I’ll throw my 2 cents in just in case it helps.

I have a very similar system to yours (3Ghz, 16GB RAM etc) I have occasionally run into painfully slow renders which I have later discovered were due to reading and/or writing to an almost full RAID. Most RAID systems’ performance plummets dramatically as you reach 90% full. I have seen renders from AE that should take a minute or two end up taking over an hour as the RAID fills up.

Good luck,

Lars

[Ron Lindeboom]

What’s the point of a post like this, Ed?

We would ask that you keep this kind of stuff off the boards.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom

Remember: Burt Bacharach lied. What the world really needs now is an undo button.

[Eric Ransdell]

Thanks to everyone for the help. I’ve been on a shoot the last three days and haven’t been able to post. I dropped RAM Cache down to 60 percent and disabled disk cache and both of those seemed to help. And I’m not running a RAID, the new MacPro has 4 1TB drives. Maybe a stupid question, but should all of my non-video media (i.e. photos, .ai artwork, etc.) be running off a second drive as well?