HOW TO USE AE7 WITH INTEL MACS

[G.marshall]

I can’t get AE7 to run well at all on my Mac Pro which has 9 GB of and a NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500. After lowering the memory settings it still crashes like crazy on RAM previews and renders. Did the same thing on the MacBook Pro as well. On the Mac Pro, even a simply Fast Blur will cause it to hang up. This is a brand new Mac Pro Quad Core 3 Ghz.

Time for Mac users to bail on After Effects?

[Graham Jones]

Hi,

have you followed the thread and tried everything? Workspaces? Prefs? Permissions? Offending Quicktime components?

Keep in mind that at best this is a workaround and unsupported solution. You obviously spent a lot on this system… I hope you did not try to set up a production system based on an unsupported software configuration…? You can’t curse a system that is not supposed to run at all on your system. Try that with Avid…

AE 8, on the other hand, which is designed from the ground up to be compatible with Intel Macs and PPC, will be out soon. Until then, you may need to get a Gridiron plugin for previews and/or do your renders on a PPC system.

Good luck,
Graham Jones.

[Kevin Camp]

i’ve been testing out opengl problems and work arounds with ae7 on a macpro today (i was actually searching around to see what other people have been doing about opengl when i stumbled in here). but based on what i’ve found, g marshall can probably fix the fast blur crashes (and any other crashes related to opengl accelerated effects) by either switching to previews adaptive resolution (ae software rendering) or (and i’m still testing this) put the fast blur (or other opengl hardware accelerated effect) on an adjustment layer.

it seems a shame not to be able to use a kick-ass gfx card in ae. so if this adjustment layer trick holds up it may be a matter of creatively structuring your comp and nested comps to utilize hardware acceleration (at least on a macpro)

[S871nr053]

Thanks Graham for all of your tips, lowering the memory and cache has worked liked a charm for rendering; however I’m still having crash problems with RAM previews when using certain effects (mainly cc effects like was mentioned earlier), I can’t just switch to a different machine to do the work I need with these effects so I was wondering if anyone has figured out how to get them to run smoothly?

Thanks!

Jen

[G.marshall]

Hi Jen,

I had to remove the Cycore FX plug-in folder and the OpenGL3D plug-in as well for it to render. It still crashes on occasion, even with the plug-ins removed, but nowhere as near as bad with the plug-ins running. Unfortunately the Cycore plug-ins just don’t seem to work properly. I just got a response from Cycore. Here’s what they wrote:

“It seems this problem affects all CFM plugins on Macintel and currently there’s nothing that we know of that we can do to fix this. The problem is related to Rosetta (apple’s PPC emulator) and we believe that only Apple and Adobe can find out why it happens and find a possible fix for it. We’re ready to do whatever we can to help out.

We’re about to release an updated version (mach-O) of Cycore FX HD that doesn’t have this problem, however I believe that you are going to use the Cycore FX standard version that ships with AE7 so this won’t help you out. Is that the case?

Nils”

So Cycore FX HD is about to come out, but this won’t help you immediately. Their web address is:
https://www.cycorefx.com/

My memory setting seems to work at 50% and 50%. I have 9 GB of RAM in a Quad Xeon.

Hope that helps.
Greg

[S871nr053]

Thanks Greg. That is a lot of help. What a bummer, I guess I’ll just be waiting for now.

-Jen

[Toddy The aussie]

Amazing – I was feeling homicidal and very alone until I stumbled on this thread!

I can’t believe everyone’s writing about exactly the same issues I’ve been having!

Is there any potential relationship with these issues and the ATI x1900 card [ i discovered when I looked for a latest driver download that the latest one is still only for PowerMac G5 – is this right?! ].

Forgive my tech ignorance if this theory is TOTALLY unrelated…

So AE8 in about June?

Toddy the Aussie

[Benoit Ricard]

really great thread thank to you all and to Graham.
talking about optimization on my macbook pro, 2G ram,
what do you think about all other intel process, like dashboard,
do we need to kill them too ?
I had so mysterious crashed (the last one burst my HD & mother board…)
that I can wait to test it again… I was on point on selling this computer & didn’t want to hear about MAC…
You gave me back FAITH….
Hugz !

[Graham Jones]

Hi,

Thanks for your post and comments. it’s all about memory… Rosetta gobbles an indordinate amount of it, and you don’t always know how much it’s taking. Universal apps use memory too, but they are slimmer and it is more obvious how much memory they are using.

So… just because you kill all the PowerPC processes, doesn’t mean you can have 25 Intel apps open and not run into issues. However, I wouldn’t worry about small stuff like Dashboard, as long as you’ve killed the PowerPC processes and don’t have too many other things open.

– Graham Jones.

[Jack Tunnicliffe]

I have been running AE 7 on a Macbook Pro for over a year, albeit slow, but without many issues. I recently ordered the 2.33 Ghz Core 2 Duo macbook pro for a little more performance, 3 gigs of ram, etc, but AE 7 won’t launch. It crashes when the app is opening. Does anyone have any suggestions. Photoshop, Illustrator, etc, all run fine under Rosetta but AE 7, even freshly reinstalled still crashes.

Jack Tunnicliffe