HOW TO USE AE7 WITH INTEL MACS

[Joel Jackson]

So here is a question. All examples so far have been based off machines with 3 GB of ram. Since AE has a 3GB limit do those of us that have more ram (5GB) use our total ram amount or 3GB to calculate the percentage that equals 1.5GB?

Joel

[Graham Jones]

Hi,

Great question; I am going more on observations than hard facts. Would you mind please testing and getting back to us?

It could be more than an interesting coincidence that 1.5GB is half of 3GB. Maybe Rosetta protects only half of the available memory. Or, maybe 1.5GB is the limit no matter how much memory you have.

Just keep in mind that when I tell AE it can use exactly 1.5GB, it still crashes— this apparently does not allow enough headroom. You might want to try setting it at 2GB as a starting point. Make sure you have a high res comp with a few filters going, adjustment layer(s), maybe a nested comp or two. If it works, try raising by 500MB at a time. If it doesn’t, try lowering by 500MB at a time.

I look forward to your results.

If anyone has any hard facts on this apparent Rosetta memory limit, can you please enlighten us?

Thanks,
Graham Jones.

[Daniel Block]

So I’ve got a macbookpro with 2gb ram. looking for suggestions as to the easy way around this general adobe problem. should i use ae6.5, ae7, restrict the memory, use rosetta? curious if there’s any benchmarks out there but i’d rather get a personable response.

Thanks much

[Ron Lindeboom]

You might try reading this forum thread and the article contained in it.

The answers are contained in here.

Ron Lindeboom

[Graham Jones]

Hi,

keeping in mind that it is an unsupported configuration no matter what you do, I have found that AE 7 is at least 50% faster on my Mac Pro than AE 6.5 was. As long as you follow the instructions here, you should be able to get it to work with no problems.

However, this is NOT a guarantee. You may want to wait to see if someone with a similar computer to yours pipes in their results. So far everyone I have seen posting has been using 3GB of RAM or more, and most have Mac Pros.

Hope this helps,
Graham Jones.

[Psimpso]

I’m looking into buying a new computer primarily for AE 7. Is all of this enough to recommend buying a Mac Pro instead of a Quad G5? Speaking of which, all of the G5/Mac Pro comparisons so far have only been with Dual G5s, I’d be curious to know how the Quad G5 stacks up to the Mac Pro.

If I were to buy a Mac Pro for AE 7; is 3GB of ram a good amount?

Will a blackmagic decklink card still work for previewing the work?

[Graham Jones]

Hi,

You may find this article interesting: https://www.barefeats.com/quad06.html — it compares a test comp and finds the Quad G5/2.5 to be 8% slower at After Effects than a Mac Pro 3.0 — considering that AE on an Intel Mac will gain speed next year when AE becomes Intel-native, the exact same Quad G5 will lag much farther behind the exact same Mac Pro.

Plus, the Mac Pro is chip-upgradable with standard Intel chips… not that it will be cheap (nor Apple-supported), it is said that 4-core Xeon chips should be able to swap out the existing 2-core chips in a Mac Pro… So while the Quad G5/2.5 will remain a Quad G5/2.5, you may find your Mac Pro is an 8-core machine in a year or two.

My personal experience is that I have more crashes and problems with AE on a G5 than I do on my Mac Pro. However, I use my Mac Pro more for Final Cut Pro than AE, and only just recently upgraded to AE 7, so I can not say that I have tested the full gamut of AE’s features.

Running AE on a Mac Pro is NOT supported by Adobe, so you do so at your own risk. My opinion is that the Mac Pro is a better deal if you plan to keep it for more than a year, where the Quad G5 is Adobe-supported, and will give near equal performance (and possibly but not definitively better stability) for the next year or so.

Your deciding factor may be if you want to run other pro apps on the same machine… If Final Cut Studio or Shake are on the same machine, you will get much better mileage out of the Mac Pro. If you need to run non-Universal apps, you may want the G5.

As for the memory, 3GB is plenty for now if you mainly will be running AE, as Rosetta will not let you use all of it for AE.

I would check with Blackmagic about their support of AE on Intel Macs… they have a great support department. You can also post on the Blackmagic forum here at the COW.

Hope this helps,
Graham Jones.

[Mrsclean]

2.66 Dual Core Intel
5 gigs of RAM.
AE 7

I cranked the max memory usage down to 1.5 gigs, and my problems went away as well.

I don’t think that the ‘half way’ theory is true, however. I have been obsessively watching my Activity Monitor for the past two weeks (am I the only one who has become a AM junkie?), I have been noticing mine craps out at 1.9ish gigs. I am going to try to lock it down to 1.8 gigs to see if that is stable enough to use.

[Graham Jones]

Hi,

Thanks for responding. So at this point, it appears to be “a little less than half.”

Thanks,
Graham Jones.

[Tielman Dewaele]

What about ram previeuws? Will it go faster this way? It looks like its going slower. Or im a wrong

T.

Peace