HOW TO USE AE7 WITH INTEL MACS

[David Modijefsky]

Interesting news Graham. Is it safe to asume that if you stuff your machine with more Ram the specs become better?

[Graham Jones]

Hi,

I don’t think more RAM over about 3GB would make much difference, as it seems Rosetta hits a memory ceiling at around 1.5GB.

NEWS FLASH:
I just finished rendering the same comp on my Dual G5/2.5 at work, now with AE 7.0. My Mac Pro renders it 40% faster, despite having less memory, and the memory settings severely limited! Here is the full set of banchmarks:

AE 6.5, Dual G5 2.5/4.5GB RAM: 53 min, 34 sec.
AE 6.5, Mac Pro Quad 2.66/3GB RAM: 54 min, 44 sec.

AE 7.0, Dual G5 2.5GHz/4.5GB RAM: 39 min, 36 sec. (AE memory set at 100%)
AE 7.0, Mac Pro Quad 2.66/3GB RAM: 24 min, 21 sec. (AE memory set at 30%)

Yippee!

Just remember: THIS IS NOT A GUARANTEE THAT IT WILL WORK FOR YOU. It is an UNSUPPORTED solution.

Hope this helps,
Graham Jones.

[Greg Jones]

Thanks for the info Graham. I’m going to give it a try. I was having a hell of a time rendering out a 1280×720 59.94 comp. It would get about 1 minute in and give me a image buffer error. I ended up having to take the project into the G5 room and it rendered out fine. I’m actually taking your advice and re-rendering it out with your specs. I’ll let you know what happens.

Greg Jones
D7,Inc.
Orlando,fl.
https://www.d7-inc.com

3Ghz Quad Intel Mac Pro
4Gb of Ram
After Effects 7
Final Cut Pro 5.1.2

[Graham Jones]

Hi Greg,

If my theories are correct, you may want to set your percentage even lower… the key is to not break the 1.5GB barrier, and allow for a little headroom. For me, 50% of 3GB (1.5) did NOT work, but 30% of 3GB (0.9GB) DID work… so for your 4GB, you may want to try starting with 25%.

Of course my theory may be off, so you may want to experiment a little, and please make sure to post back with your results.

Also, don’t forget to open Activity Monitor and quit any non-Intel processes you don’t need.

Hope this helps,
Graham Jones.

[Greg Jones]

So far using the settings that you mentioned earlier my render is moving around 40% faster than it was before. It’s also gotten a lot farther than it did before. Before it would get around 20% into the render and it would crash. The render is now 50% done and so far so good.

thanks

Greg Jones
D7,Inc.
Orlando,Fl.

[Graham Jones]

Hi Greg,

how did it go?

And has anyone else tried this? I’d be curious to know your results. If we pool our resources, I think it’s pretty likely we’ll get AE7 working 100% on Intel — just don’t tell Adobe!

Incidentally, if this doesn’t do it for you, I gather from some web research that most reasons for AE7 not working on Intel stem around memory issues, except for a couple of Quicktime conflicts I have seen (Popwire WMV components and some Avid components may need to be removed from /Library/Quicktime).

Hope this helps,
Graham Jones.

[Greg Jones]

Worked like a charm. I checked my activity monitor and it was using a lot more of my processors than before. I think you solved the problem. It rendered without a hitch. I’ll try to get the word out about this so everyone can benefit. Again thanks for solving the problem.

Greg Jones
D7,Inc.
Orlando,Fl.

[Graham Jones]

Hi Greg,

Thanks for responding— that’s great news. Who of us would have thought that reducing memory would bring faster renders? 😉

Cheers,
Graham Jones.

[Steve Forde]

I hadn’t heard that our software (GridIron Nucleo) would solve the problem, but based on your results I now understand why.

The key here is Rosetta is a RAM pig. It uses a silly amount of RAM just to do the most trivial of functions (it is doing all its code conversions and endian swapping in memory from PPC to Intel). Our product, and your method restricts the amount of RAM that AE is allowed to use, thereby dramatically reducing the RAM footprint that Rosetta needs to do operations.

Obviously Rosetta was not designed for huge memory applications like AE, so it runs into trouble when huge chunks of memory are allocated and essentially shuts down (therefore starving AE of more memory it thinks it should get – causing the buffer errors).

All this being said, I would imagine that your method should work for most eveyone that is encountering these errors. Many users may not be utilizing RAM heavily in the first place, and therefore not hit the issue at all, but anyone doing HD, 16 or 32 bit etc etc should find this a lifesaver.

Ironically Nucleo only solved this problem as a side effect of not trying to take too much RAM from the foreground instance of AE (Nucleo uses background instances), so we really ratchet down how much RAM each can access. (and therefore essentially follow your model)

Since the product is designed to optimize render performance (not provide stability on Mac Pro’s) I would recommend your method to everyone with an Intel Mac. Now if you want to run your CPU’s at 100%, thereby further reducing render time while still keeping your RAM cache maxed out for longer previews…..thats a Nucleo story….;)

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Graham Jones]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your detailed and informative comments. It’s great to understand a little better why my theory is proving successful, and that people have further options available with Nucleo. I actually would have bought it first, but cash is tight, so was driven to find a free solution. I hope you sell a lot of copies now that people know that there are sound reasons that it helps the issue.

Hey, I think it would be a great idea for you to solicit a test group of some kind, to quantify and test to what extent Nucleo can help, and also what are the ideal memory settings for the best performance. In your experience, is Nucleo working in all areas with AE7 on Intel Macs? I know you wouldn’t want to say “we are the official solution” when even Adobe is shying away from supporting the boatloads of people who want to make this work. However, unofficial solutions are great to have!

Just a thought,
Graham Jones.