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After Effects CS4 Memory Settings for OSX
Hi All!
I am a self taught computer person and dont understand alot of the lingo. I have been using after effects for a few years. Im having memory problems, it’s rendering slow and wont let me do multi processing… It’s probably because my imac is 3 years old, BUT I thought I would ask anyway.
Can some one tell me —
1. how much RAM to leave for other applications?? I have it at 2GB
2. minimum allocation per CPU?? I have it at 1GB
3. CPU’s to leave for other applications? It’s set at 1, I cant change it
Im on an imac
3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB 800 MHz DDR2
I have tried to read threads about memory, but cant seem to get my head around it… Also I just threw away alot of stuff and have 429 Gigs available, dunno if that would help performance??
I will say on my laptop which is new, but only a macbook, it seems to be multiprocessing frames and rendering a bit faster, so maybe that it??
thanx for your help!
tiff mcginnis
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2 Replies
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with 4gb of ram, you’ll want to keep ‘render multiple frames simultaneously’ off. ae can still use the other core(s) for any render processes/effects that are multithreaded, so don’t feel like your wasting cores completely.
for ram for other apps, i’d have that no less than 1gb and probably no more than 2gb (half your total ram).
while you render you might open the activity monitor (applications>utilities) and monitor the cpu usage. its a good indicator for how good your memory settings are. if the cpu levels are high, then the ram is feeding them enough data to process, if the levels are low, then you may need to tweak the ram settings a bit…. and these settings are really per comp, some comps may work well with more ram, others may render faster if the system has more ram (that’s the ram for other apps).
also, if you only have a single drive for os, apps and media, you might try disabling disk caching in ae. this can often help performance. moving media and renders onto a firewire800 may help too, and may allow you to enable disk caching (to the main drive).
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
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