How do I optimize AE?

[Kevin Camp]

in the preferences>preivews disable opengl by unchecking the ‘use opengl acceleration’ option and set accelerate preivews to use adaptive resolution. opengl is still not great in ae, it often causes problems and it isn’t compatible with multiprocessing, which we’ll set up next…

in preferences>multiprocessing check the box for render multiple frames simultaneously. this will set ae to launch a render engine for each available processing core that you have, which of course increases rendering power. it also allows the 32-bit cs3 application to use up to 3gb of ram per core, so you can use all the ram that you have installed, rather than just the 3gb that a 32-bit app is limited to. and, as mentioned ealier, with opengl off, it will speed up your preview renders too.

i would also enable disk cache (preferences>memory & cache). for performance reasons, if possible set the cache folder to a disk that is on a separate cntroller than your media will live on… so if your media is on an external drive, set the cache to an internal drive. the 2000mb default should be fine for sd (although it shouldn’t hurt to increase it if you have the space), if you work hd you may want to increase it more.

you have enough ram that i wouldn’t mess with the max memory or max ram cache settings unless you get image buffer errors… then increasing disk cache and lowering the max ram cache value can allow more space for image buffering.

that should get you started.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin James]

Hi Kevin ( feels like I’m talking to my self),

Thanks for the help. I have made the changes and see how they work.

Thanks again.

Kevin J

[Bart Straman]

hi Kevin

I always thought that the multi-processor plugin automaticly installed with AE and is active when you have dual core. (in AE7)

It’s weird, because in the preferences i can’t find any tap called “multi-processing”. This is some new feature in CS3 ??

Bart

[Kevin James]

Hi Bart,

I have CS3 which has a multiprocessing tab in the preferences.

Not sure about AE7.

KJ

[Chris Wright]

Some plugins will crash with -render multiple frames simultaneously. Some aren’t coded to work multithreaded. Disable if you crash a lot. Also, enabling disk cache with only 1 hard drive will actually make performance worse. And don’t try enabling Max RAM size% above 85% or computer will lock up.

[Kevin Camp]

some effects are are multithreaded and will use more processors when available. this is true for many versions of ae (i’m not sure when some of the effects started becoming multithreaded)….

however, i think it could be stated that the render engine for pre cs3 versions of after effects are not multithreaded, so much of the rendering process will not benefit from the extra processors.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW