AE & RAM, the definitive guide

[Steve Roberts]

If I understand it correctly, AE only uses the RAM it needs. If you’re concerned about processor usage to speed up renders, look into Nucleo Pro by Gridiron software.

[Michael Powers]

Great Post.

Will AfterFX CS3 (or some future) have a 64-bit option, like 3dsMax9 does?

This is becoming a huge problem for us as we work with 5,000×1,800 pixel frames pretty often these days.

Can anyone recommend another compositing app which has a similar level of scriptablilty?

Michael Powers
Art Director, Animation
Cramer
Crameronline.com

[Accountneedsrealnameupdate]

What kind of scripting are you doing? We’ve had some killer problems with large frames and running out of RAM, taken to rendering image sequences rather than our usual quicktimes and using the background render script as it seems to get further without crashing, still it does crash, sequences are great though as all I have to do is delete any corrupt frames and AE will automatically fill in the blanks, no wasted time setting the render area or patching movies together.
I’m trying NUKE right now, can’t say yet how the scripting is but the projects themselves are just scripts that seem easy enough to pick apart and edit (I’m not saying I can do that yet but looking at them in a text editor they seem pretty straightforward), there’s no way I’m switching to Motion but supposedly it’s projects are similarly editable, it would be cool if Adobe went that way too, the idea of being able to open a buggy project in a text editor and copy-pasting into a new file something I want to use seems really nice. Shake is officially dead and Combustion seems to be going nowhere fast so it’s AE, Nuke and Fusion that I’m keeping an eye on right now, Nuke and Fusion now run on Mac, PC and Linux too which is great too.
Don’t know if this has been any use to you, seems like a lot of people must be hitting the ram barrier too, interested in what scripting you’re doing too.

Glennser

[Michael Powers]

Scripting:
We do quite a bit of expressions driven comps, and layer based pseudo particle systems. Quicky Custom tools running jsx – a la Aenhancers.com. 3dsMax scene imports. Some C# AeRender.exe farm automation (unfortunately the datagridview control sucks on XP 64-bit).

Since most of what we do is more “motion graphics” with compositing rather than strict compositing, Combustion seemed like our only alternative. We just junked our Smoke for a DS nitrous(bad choice IHMO) so Flame is not an option. Nuke looks pretty cool, but seems like it is more of a strictly compositing tool.

Running AeRender.exe for large frames seems to crash a lot less often. Also if you have lots of RAM you can start multiple versions and peg all your cores.

Michael Powers
Art Director, Animation
Cramer
Crameronline.com

[Dont_slam_or_well_close_your_account]

Thanks a lot,man.I got 2*Xeon5160 and 4GB FBD-ECC RAM.And a damn Raid0.It really Brought a lot of problem to me.I rather to buy something else like DDR2-800,but it’s too late……
Thak you anyway.

[Nikxid]

Congs!

Thats a fine article.. Which has lead me to a question.

I use AE in windows and Mac.
The Mac workstation is equiped with 5GB RAM. When I set RAM to under 50% usage from the preferences i get the maximum duration in the ram preview. If I set it to 70 or 80 or 90 % its rendering less than it had rendered with 40 or 30 % of usage. After a lot of tweaking around i came to the conclusion that it can handle just fine only the 2,5gb of ram, and when i try to make it use more it is just hopeless.

I would really like to hear what it is you think goes wrong in the process.

thanks a lot,
and well done for the article.

Nikos

[Antonio Pasquale]

Hello….I need help

I have a quadcore with 8 gigabytes of RAM w Windows 7 to 64 bits.
I can use to After Effects CS4 and Premiere Pro CS4 all RAM available or do I have accontettarmi of 4 giga.

Thanks

[Trevor Mongar]

Is RAM the reason only 60% of my video was saved to an avi file with Ram Preview?
I worked VERY hard on this video, do you know how I can save the whole video?
My operating system is Windows XP Professional 2002, Service Pack 3.
Please help!!!