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After Effects Render SLOW – Slower than my old PC
I am using a new 1 month old 20″ iMac, 2.0Ghz with 4gb DDR2 RAM, running OS X Leopard. Adobe After Effects CS3 is rendering really slow, and I mean like the same as my PC. Also the same with Premiere Pro, it renders really slow and I have tried different formats too, in premiere pro it took 2 hours to render a 5 minute video (saved to .mp4 640×480 pixels, end size was 20mb). This is wayyy to slow.
I compared my Mac with my old PC running Windows XP, it is pentium 4, 3.2Ghz with Hyper threading technonlogy and 1.5 GB DDR Ram. I tested rendering andrew kramers 3d room tutorial, I downloaded the project file. I only chose to render some of it and the old PC was FASTER than the Mac by around 15-20%. BUT, the mac was ONLY using 6% of the 3gb (it only recognises 3 gig not 4 but I dont mind that too much) and the PC was using 60-70% of the 1.5GB (thats using more RAM than the mac) So why can’t I get the Mac to use more RAM when rendering, and why is it slower??? It is faster at EVERYTHING else, well the ram preview is about the same.
How can I get my mac to use more of the RAM and why is it rendering and previewing the same if not SLOWER than my 5 year old PC?
Any help would be awesome, thanks– Dillon
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6 Replies
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What are your Memory & Cache settings?
Do you have multi-processing turned on?
Are you using OpenGL for renders?
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Hey mate
1) Memory and Cache, the max RAM usage is 120% (default)
2) Yes its on
3) Video Card Doesn’t support itWhich format and encoder should I use to render for youtube?
Thanks,
– Dillon -
Try disabling Multi-processing just to see if that speeds your renders up. I’ve had good experiences with multi-processing recently, but it used to stall my renders for 30-45 seconds right out of the gate.
Is your Maximum RAM Cache Size set to 60% or lower?
I would render out of AE losslessly and then compress to H.264 for YouTube using Compressor or another application.
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Folks,
I don’t think you understand. There is a real problem going on here. It is not about how complex your layers are, what formats you are using, etc. If it renders faster on a SLOWER system then there is a problem.
I have had a new system for just one day:
Dell Workstation T7400 with dual quad-cores at 3.2 GHz
Win XP 64 bit
32 GB 800 MHz RAM
4 15K SAS drives in a dual RAID 0 configurationand to cut a very long story short I am getting the same pathetically slow rendering speeds as Dillon (and Thomas Honeyman from another post). How about 3.2 frames per second on just the playback of one DVCPRO100 P2 stream? I get 18fps from my other cheap Dell Vostro system (Win XP 32 bit – dual core 2.16 GHz with 4 GB RAM!!!) And yes, I have multi-processing on.
Finally, each of the 8 processes only consumes 200-400 MB of RAM and the cores are barely being touched. Nucleo Pro 2 makes all the cores go to about 74% utilization with 2 GB used per process. It is far faster with its “Fast Render” feature but it still doesn’t seem to render as fast as I would have hoped.
Anyway, if anyone has been able to solve this problem I would like to know too.
For now I can think of 3 things:
1) Try Adobe’s “fix” to only allow it to see 4 or 6 cores instead of the full 8 since there are sometimes issues when it tries to use more than 3 cores (see the readme with CS3)
2) Ensure you have the latest video driver for your card (I know I don’t so as soon as I get home tonight it will be the first thing I update)
3) Use Adaptive Resolution in preferences
That’s it for now
Brendan
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Sorry, I had meant to say that sometimes CS3 runs into problems when there are more than 6 cores (not 3 as I had said).
Brendan
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Great help thank you…
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