How can i make after effects CS4 run smoothly?

[Kevin Camp]

there is an .ini file that you can set to get windows to see 4gb of ram (search for ‘windows 4gb switch’ for more info), but i believe that 1gb is reserved for windows, 3gb for other applications.

the first thing you might try in resetting the ae preference file. quit ae and hold ctrl+alt+shift when reopenning ae, then hit ‘ok’. this will rest the preferences to their default. see how your project works with the default settings.

a few common things that can negatively affect performance in ae are:

1. turning disk cahce on if you only have one drive or one drive bus (like the internal drive bus) for your media, renders and disk cache. disabling disk cache can often improve performance in this case by lessening the amount of data being forced through a single drive bus.
2. working with footage that uses temporal compression (or interframe compression)… codecs like mpeg-2, hdv, mpeg-4, h.264 and others use temporal compression which will slow after effects down considerably. if you are using any of those, convert you footage to uncompressed, lossless, quicktime photo-jpeg, dv (or dvcprohd), avid dnxhd or any codec that uses only intraframe compression and ae will work much better.
3. enabling multiprocessing with too little ram… the amount of ram you’ll want to have for each processing core will vary based on the project. sd projects can get by with 1gb per core, but hd projects will work better with 2gb or more (up to 4gb).

but some projects are just more demanding on a system, and yours may be one of those.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[David Bogie]

You might want to visit the adobe.com discussion and forum areas. Plenty of discussion about crashing and tweaking performance. you can also just scroll down here for a few pages and see what turns up. Seem to be many posts about PCs with Intel processors working better than those with others but I’m on a Macintosh and I’ve got my own problems.

bogiesan

[Tony Tan]

GridIron Nucleo Pro helped me big time with CS3. Unfortunately they do not support CS4 yet. Lots of bugs in CS4.

———————-
Tony
http://www.memoryimprintstudio.com

[Karl Velarde]

thanks for this guide,i appreciate this, i really do
and it makes me understand things i don’t quite yet know how it really works

btw does the resolution effects my windows apps? yes like AE photoshop
im using 1680 x 1050 on my desktop and it goes for the apps will it affect my projects? like can it also be 1 of the reason AE is running slow?

[Karl Velarde]

wish i could buy a new pc anytime soon and i’ll go with intel
whats the difference between notebook/laptop to desktop with the same specs?

[Todd Kopriva]

You should also check out the “Improve performance” section of After Effects Help.

———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————

[Kevin Camp]

yep, everything that dave said, plus a notebook with the same specs as a tower will probably cost 2x as much and hold far less ram… it’s easy to find a tower that can be expanded to 32gb of ram vs. most notebooks top out at 4-gb.

if you *need* portability, then its a sacrifice worth making, if you don’t then you’re probably better off with a tower. if you don’t need to do video work on the notebook, you could always pick up a netbook for $200-400 and a tower and still come out ahead money wise.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW