After Effects CS4 + Snow Leopard Rendering Issues

[Matthew Woods]

Memory is really important for AE. It should cost only $80 or so to upgrade to 4GB of RAM and that should help a lot. My rule of thumb is about 2-3s gig of RAM per processor used, + 1 gig leftover for finder/system operations. By that calculation, you are still short a gig for even single process use. Maybe snow leopard uses more memory than leopard, so it spares less for AE.

I don’t know that a solid state drive is much faster than a physical one. I thought the big advantage of those was no moving parts and less power consumption. Personally, if you do a lot of AE work, I’d invest in a desktop. I think AE needs the horsepower and screen size.

[Adrian Jans]

Well, I currently have 4GB of RAM (2x2GB). The computer I am using, macbook pro, 2.93GHz has only 2 RAM slots and can max out at 8GB (4x2GB). If you don’t mind, do you think you could send me a link to the site where you buy RAM?

The reason they are telling me a SSD would be good has something to do with the way they interact with swap files, and that SSD run incomparably faster than a hard disk, and that the hard disk basically acts as a giant bottle neck if your pushing your RAM to its limits.

In reality, the way things are right now, I pretty much only use AE to render alpha channel videos in FLV format, for whatever reason AE is the only program that handles this smoothly, (and they absolutely have to be FLV). I’m rendering simple “guy standing in front of a website” videos with a little button to minimize him. Although there is a high possibility that I will be using AE more and more throughout the job.

I would absolutely love to be able to buy a Desktop mac pro, or hell, even an imac, but the way things are, its gonna be at least a year before I can afford it, or the company feels financially comfortable enough to drop that kinda cash on me.