Is AE only using one of four cores?

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

If you are using CS3 (AE 8) you should be able to set it to use multiple processors in preferences. I could be wrong here, but my understanding is that earlier versions only use a single core. Also the amount of memory you have available per core is a critical factor when using more than one processor. I would shoot for at least 2 gigs per core.

I prefer using Gridiron’s Nucleo Pro since that allows me to use multiple cores for rendering in the background and leaves AE free to continue working in the foreground. But here, you have to deactivate multicore rendering in AE’s preferences.

If you like to do things the difficult way, you could set up your output to render to an image sequence and then, working in the command line, manually fire up the command line renderer four times, with each instance set to render every forth frame and starting on frame 1, 2, 3, and 4. I don’t know that there is a way to force them to use a specific core here… my guess is the OS would handle distributing the processes. In any case, this is how I did things until I got Nucleo.

Hope this helps,

Lars

[Darby Edelen]

[Lars Bunch] “I would shoot for at least 2 gigs per core.”

I would recommend shooting for fewer gigs per core if you want to use more of your cores to render. For example, if you give each core 2GB of RAM and you only have 2GB of RAM in your system then AE will only use 1 core to render.

Unless you have XP 64 or another 64-bit OS, then at the most you have 3GB of RAM available to AE. Try shooting for 1GB instead of 2.

Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Robert Storm]

ahk thanks a ton guys, I really appreciate it!