how much would the RAM increase AE’s performance?

[B_alen]

I have 2.7 dual Xeon with 2G RAM and AE is slooooooow when I put Saphire edge glow effects. Almost impossible to preview it. Now I’m waiting for G5 dual 2.7, 4G RAM, I should get it in two weeks and I can tell you then if the performance improved and for how much. But I guess that there isn’t a computer fast enough in this world to handle multiple effects on multiple layers in AE.

[Dflamholc]

you’ re lucky that you’re waiting for such a dream machine and you’re probably right, no amount of RAM will probably be enough to feed big AE projs. it’s funny, i’m not even using really heavy filters yet. I only have 24 or so imported illustrator layers in 3d to build a room with a corridor outside, then I’ve put some textures on the wall. it’s basically when I turn on two or three lights that everything stops all together. i can obviously work without the ligths and textures, but it’s a weird notch in the workflow fron when everything works smoothely and then suddenly chokes. please post a note about you’re upgrade though, if you get the chance. it’d be good to hear how you experience the difference. and thanks for your reply,. d 🙂

[Satesh Ramjattan]

from what i hear AE will only utilize up to 2gigs, being a 32bit app. i may be wrong though.

[B_alen]

Dream machine? Well I certainly hope so. Otherwise my boss will shoot me if I start complaining again that I don’t have the tools to do the job 😉

What I have in my animation is one animated, masked, solid layer with two animated edge glow effects on it and it’s so slow. I had to turn off the effects, animate the layer as I want to, render the clip to file and preview it, then make changes to effects animation, render & preview again, changes, render&preview, changes,….. And so on and so on. Incredibly time consuming.

[Derrick]

Could you perhaps consider doing a render-farm with say 2 PC’s ?

That should in theory cut your render time in half.

– Derrick

[Dflamholc]

sure no probs, i’ve even had five computers hooked up together and one beautiful day we even managed to get a pc working smoothly with a bunch of macs in a renderfarm… (allthough my old g3 laptop managed to get every fouth frame flickering due to different colour calibration… which wasn’t something I had any interest learning all about immediately so I cut it out of the chain)

the RAM thing is just my concern with being able to work faster with bigger projects. i’m about to shut a single g5 down here and rip out the ram from that and put it in my dual g5 to see if there is any noticable change in speed while working, but i know that this kind of greedy behaviour usually ends in a mess and I’m not interested in doing physical damage to the machines so I though I’d just post the question her first before I create total havoc… thanks for the advice though, render farms are a must! 🙂 /d

[Brandon]

32-bit programs only utilizes 2gigs of Ram. So it doesn’t matter how much more Ram you put in it. I would upgrade your processor.

[Dflamholc]

cool, I had no idea… thanks for the info! I’ll just wait for the g6 🙂 /d

[Jonathan Miller]

This is off-topic for the RAM discussion, but I just read that everything slows down to a crawl when you add two or three lights. Well, that would make sense, since the processor is then having to compute all of the lights and shadows. I don’t think that RAM would factor much in this sort of thing, but a faster computer probably would shorten the render times. Heck, I know it would having just upgraded from a single and dual 867 G4 to a dual 2.3 GHz G5. Man, what a difference.

Keep in mind that if you need to speed up your previews, then turn on draft 3D which will ignore all of your lights and camera depth of field. Turn it on when you’re done, or just need to see what things really look like.

Good luck!

Jon
TreeLine Productions
Fort Collins, CO USA

[Derrick]

Have you tried GridIron ?

https://www.gridironxfactor.com/index_home.asp (They even have a Free 2 CPU)

thanks,
Derrick