HOW TO USE AE7 WITH INTEL MACS

[Graham Jones]

Hi Andrea,

Thanks for your kind comments. I’m glad you were able to get good use out of my findings.

Cheers,
Graham Jones.

[Jack Tunnicliffe]

I’m assuming the 59.97 you speak of is just a typo. There is no such frame rate. 59.94 would be the correct number.

[Andrea Stewart]

Silly me. Yes I meant 59.94.

FYI, I rendered this :15 open last night and it took 17 hours! But, hey, it never quit on me, so that’s a blessing.

I’m sure its the lights and motion blurs and nested pre-comps, etc. Though I have to say, most of the thing is vector art in HD pre-comps in an HD comp. You wouldn’t think it would be so RAM intensive.

Looking into networking all our computers so I can render at night using our small group of Macs as a render farm.

Andrea Stewart
Producer/Editor/Director – Owner
Germane Creative LLC

[Graham Jones]

Hi Andrea,

have you considered pre-rendering any of the nested comps? It’s amazing how much faster renders go when you pre-render stuff that doesn’t need to change very often.

Even if you get a render farm going, pre-rendering what you don’t change that often will help you work much more quickly… that and lower resolution proxies.

Hope this helps,
Graham.

[Rowan Wernham]

Hi – did you ever get this problem fixed?

I am working on a 2K project with some very large BG’s (up to 8000px X 1600px)

It renders fine at half quality or lower but hits the “Unable to allocate … image buffer” error on full quality.

I have tried lowering my memory percentages even down to around 30% and setting a 5GB disc cache and purging all caches etc.

I am using AE8.0.0.2 (CS3, still shy of any updates..) on a quadcore intel mac pro with 10GB of ram.

I can live with not being able to render at full quality for now and the deadline is months off, but I will eventually need to output this at full res!

Cheers!

Rowan

[Rowan Wernham]

I think I may have found the answer right after I posted this..

https://generalspecialist.com/2006/11/avoiding-after-effects-error-could-not.asp

Managed to render one frame out by setting my maximum RAM cache right down to 10%

Another frame I tested hit the buffer again but I think maybe I could get around this by using the secret pref which enables you to automatically purge after every frame!

seems a bit sucky and may end up buying Nucleo Pro which apparently will also get around this issue?

[Darren Manden]

Although this thread has been dead for a LONG time, I thought I’d add a post just in case someone was sitting in a similar situation to me.

I’m still using AE 7 on an Intel Mac Pro Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz Quads with 12 GB RAM (I know, why not just get a new AE when using this machine? Well…it’s coming soon). Anyway, I used to have occasional buffer issues, but recently, after upgrading to Snow Leopard, AE would hang on pretty much any render. Thankfully the workaround regarding dropping the memory down works FANTASTICALLY well!

I just thought I’d post and let anyone using an Intel Mac running Snow Leopard and AE 7 know that this works well. Thanks to Graham for originally figuring this out! You’ve saved me countless headaches!!!

[Graham Jones]

Hi,

Thanks for the update; glad to be of service!

Cheers,
G.