After Effects Memory and Multi-Processing Advice

[Michael Szalapski]

At least 2 GB of RAM per core. AE can use up to 4, but 2 is the absolute minimum you want.
Read this.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Bob Crampton]

Thanks Michael, just to make it clear to my own reasoning did you mean increase it from 1.52GB to 2GB? or did you mean increase the minimum allocation per cpu [0.5]setting to 2GB?

Regards Bob

[Michael Szalapski]

I would increase the minimum allocation to 2 and tell it to use one less core or whatever you have to do to make it use more than 2 GB per core.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Bob Crampton]

Cheers Michael I’ll give it ago. Any other suggestions are welcome.

Thanks Bob

[Michael Szalapski]

[Bob Crampton] “Any other suggestions are welcome.”

Buy more RAM. The current version of AE can (with a 64 bit OS) use up to 4 gigs per process. The new version coming out (CS5/After Effects 10.0) will be a fully 64 bit program. It will probably be able to use tons more than that.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Bob Crampton]

Buy more ram LOL my motherboards limit is 8GB! and I have a 64bit OS already (thats something!). I wish money grew on trees.

Thanks Bob

[Bob Crampton]

Hello Dave its a CPU Intel 12MB Cache, 45nm and yes it runs After Effects CS4 95% no problem. I’ll try that 1GB minimum you recommend.

Dave does it matter what graphics card you have in After Effects? or does it rely mainly on ram and CPU power.

Thanks Bob

[Bob Crampton]

Yes the 8GB limitation is not so bad; but as you mentioned After Effects loves ram and therefore the limitation is then magnified somewhat. Then again I didn’t have After Effects back then when I built my computer.

Out of interest Dave, what spec do you run After Effects with?

[Michael Szalapski]

I can’t speak for Dave, but at the office my computer has dual quad-core Intel Xeon processors with 16 Gigs of RAM (I WANT MORE!!!) on Windows Vista 64 bit (to be upgraded at some point) and some sort of decent graphics card but since I’m just doing AE the card doesn’t really matter a lot. I’ve got a zippy RAID setup too, btw.
(I also capture using AJA, but I don’t think you were asking about that.)

At home I’m running a Pentium 4 processor (before they had hyperthreading) at 2.4 ghz, 1 GB of RAM on Windows XP service pack 2.
Yeah…
I need a new machine, but I plan to pay this off first.

Although, I do rag on my old machine occasionally, it still works. I did the intro for my friend’s video with it and it didn’t suck too badly. I mean, I expected it to die; the original is 1920×1080 HD
I mean, if the machine hadn’t been so sluggish, I would have done more with the graphic, but whaddya want? It was free work!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcqPW9K5Tvk

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Walter Soyka]

I’ve got an eight-core Mac with 32 GB of RAM.

I’d estimate that for most of my HD renders, I usually have between 8 and 16 GB free, so that means I can leave other apps open and running. My large-raster widescreen renders nearly max out the RAM.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events