Mac Pro interface performance

[Kevin Camp]

i’m still a bit concerned about your ram config….

you mentioned you had 4x4gb + 2x1gb for 10gb of ram, the math doesn’t quite work…. i assume you have 4x2gb + 2x1gb = 10gb….

when you add ram (at least to the later macpros) you should have matched pairs of ram installed in same sizes on corresponding risers… i don’t know if explained that well, but if you wanted to install all the ram you have (10gb) the best ram config would be:

riser 1/dimm1 – 2gb
riser 1/dimm2 – 2gb
riser 1/dimm3 – 1gb (original ram)
riser 1/dimm4 – 1gb (original ram)
riser 2/dimm1 – 2gb
riser 2/dimm2 – 2gb
riser 2/dimm3 – empty
riser 2/dimm4 – empty

that config will take advantage of the interleaving between the risers for the first 8gb of ram insalled, you’ll lose that interleaving if you have the 2x1gb sticks in either of the first 2 slots on either riser…

if you wanted to remove the original apple ram the then config would be like this:

riser 1/dimm1 – 2gb
riser 1/dimm2 – 2gb
riser 1/dimm3 – empty
riser 1/dimm4 – empty
riser 2/dimm1 – 2gb
riser 2/dimm2 – 2gb
riser 2/dimm3 – empty
riser 2/dimm4 – empty

as an additional note, you can gain some performance (i think around 15% in tests i’ve seen, i’ll look for the link) if you fill all available ram sots. the test i saw used all like sized modules, but it may also hold true for mixed sizes… i.e. you may be able to throw an additional 2x1gb sticks in riser 2/slots 3 & 4 to get a bit more out of you machine. and you may bea able to find the 2x1gb apple ram on ebay that someone is discarding after updating their macpro’s ram.

here’s that link https://www.barefeats.com/harper3.html. note they used a benchmarking utility for ram filling, not a real world render test, so take that for what it is worth….

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Nicola Scodellaro]

Hi Kevin,

thanks for your post! I made some research before buying the mac pro ram and I was fully aware of the delicate balance (and sheer luck!) that’s needed to buy the right ram for the mac pro and make the system take full advantage of it. As you imagined, I mistyped: I have 10 gigs configured just as you said with the exact same distribution that you wrote. There was an apple document online that I usaed as reference that was a quick guide with all the rules for properly installing ram on the early 2008 mac pros.
I also remember that barefeats post! When I read it I thought that if the system sees all the ram, fine… I’d rather have 2 gigs more than less, even if a little faster.

What I’m wondering is if it’s possible that different brands of RAM can cause my kind of problems. I don’t know how actually ae manages ram and data. I hope to launch the final render tomorrow (it’d better be fast…), so I can finally test ae without the apple ram and see what happens.

Also, I’m finding multiprocessor previewing really unusable: the processes take a lot of time to start and even to stop when I want to see the preview and ae feels a lot more laggy and unstable when mp is on. On acitivity monitor the processes launched by ae and the ae app itself is intermittently not responding, plus very rarely all the processor use more than 50% at the same time.
I’m working with mp off and plan to switch it on for the final render.
Can somebody confirm this not so great implementation of mp?

[Brendan Coots]

I would wager that audio is probably NOT the real source of your problem, because that would have no impact on performance when the playhead is parked and you are trying to draw masks. The trouble overall sounds like data overload.

I do think that loading 20-50mb photoshop files could be a bit of an issue. While a video file may be 10GB and AE can handle it just fine, the datarate per frame (with, say, Animation codec) is only going to be 2MB/frame or so. With a large, single frame file like that, AE is having to shovel through a massive amount of data per frame – I would imagine the full 20-50MB. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong on this aspect of how AE handles single frame files.

That said, you may want to look at certain factors with your PSD imports. For example, can any of them be rendered out of photoshop to a lossless format like PNG, which will be much smaller than the full layered PSD? Also, are there any Layer Effects or Styles applied to them in Photoshop that are left “live” before importing the PSDs into AE? How many layers are in each PSD? I would guess that the size of your PSDs, or potential issues within them, is what is causing the trouble.

Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com

[Nicola Scodellaro]

Hi Brendan, thanks for your post. As Dave said, your is a really good point. Come to think of it, I’m rellay clogging the channels in my projects. The downside is that I’m doing it because it’s the best workflow: I make illustrations in PS and then I have to animate every single layer (and I had even a hundred of them) to make a fluid animation; Also, zooming in and out is necessary, so my images are at the least 1000 pixels wide, when not 2000 or 3000. The bigger is 5500×5500 and it was a nightmare because I was still on the Imac 24″.

At this point I really don’t know how to optimize things, because even saving every layer to an external file I would still end with tens of single jpgs at the same moment on the same frame. I could probably pre render the animated illustration once I finished to apply effects on every single layer, that would save me some lagging later, but would not help a lot in the moment of the animation process.
I will try to adjust my workflow knowing that data per frame is a very sensible aspet for ae.

On a positive note: multiprocessor rendering is really, really fast. A full res rendering of the project took 2 hours with motion blur and post- effects on, while a comparable 3 minutes movie on the Imac 24″ 2.33 was a matter of 10 hours or so…

[Nicola Scodellaro]

And I thought pre-composing was good for me… None of the things I tried helped reduce the delay before the ram preview start… then I concentrated od the message ‘locking existing frames’ that appears when I click ‘0’ to get the preview… the time I have to wait watching the spinning beachball for 10 seconds or more before the ram preview rendering begins is NOT directly related to he complexity of the project, but on the amount of precomps involved. I discovered this by deleting one by one all the layers in a comp with 4 or 5 precomps in it. At every deletion the waiting time for the ram preview to start was shorter, and when I had no precomps it was instantaneous. To have the final proof, I then pasted all the contents of all the precomps I deleted into the main comp and guess what: with the same amount of data but without precomps the ram preview started instantly, with sound.
Couple this with the fact that ram preview with audio disabled from the ram preview options is instantaneous, even with a lot of precomps, as well as hitting the space bar (but again with no sound).
There is no apparent logic.

So, I guess that my plans to switch ram banks, try ae on boot camp and such are just useless, since this looks like something tied to how ae manages things and not really on my setup or settings. Having hundreds of layers in the same comp is really messy, but I can say that in my case it somehow helps performance!

[Kevin Camp]

i’m glad you found a solution to your problem, but you might want to post your findings on adobe’s ae forum just to see if anyone there has any input.

i can’t say i’ve noticed the same issue on any of the macpros we have (a newer 8-core w/ 12gb and a older 4-core w/ 6gb), and i pre-comp quite a bit. i may experiment a bit… do you have a lot of compressed footage or compressed audio in the pre-comps?

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Nicola Scodellaro]

Hi Kevin,

my findings are more an intellectual speculation than real-world help, since having literally hundreds of layers on the same comp would be madness… At least now I know that if sound previewing is important I should reduce precomposing at the minimum possilble to avoid too much mess on the timeline.

>> do you have a lot of compressed footage or compressed audio in the pre-comps?
there are almost only my usual big psd layers and mostly no audio or the occasional single aiff uncompressed track, but I tried also deleting audio from the precomps with no results.
So the situation is that a precomp with NO audio would slow an audio preview (‘.’) and a ram preview (‘0’), while the same data of the precomp pasted into the main timeline with audio would not have delays when previewing audio or ram previewing.
At the same time, I will get instant ram preview if I switch audio off from the ram preview panel.

I really can’t see any logic to it. The only rule is that the presence of audio and pre comps causes a delay w/spinning beachball with the message ‘locking existing frames’.

I will definitely post something on adobe forums, thanks!

[Michael Heid]

Nicola,
I have a very similar configuration to yours and have brand new ram installed in the same manner as you, 10GB. I have to wonder if that is the issue because my problems seem quite similar. The only difference being, when I get the beach ball during ram preview, I often have to force quit the app because it never comes back. This evening, I’ll play with different ram configs and see if that is in fact the issue.

[Nicola Scodellaro]

Hi Michael,
maybe I can spare you some sweat on the ram side: I tried to remove the two original apple gigs that came with the mac pro and had the machine with 8 gb of the same brand for almost two months with no discernible gains in performance. So I put back the 2 gbs a week ago and everything was the same. Except that I configured an additional core in the maxprocesses preference file and got an even faster multicore render. So, as far as I can tell you: for me RAM was nevere the issue.

From your symptoms I can only imagine a scenario. AE cs3 has a hard time working with all 8 processors if it doesn’t have approx 2 gbs for each core:if you use mp with 10gb the app can become unstable. If you have ‘multiprocessing’ turned on in the preferences the mp settings kick in even if you try to do a ram preview, hence the lockups.
I suggest you to turn off MP and try to do a ram preview. Also, the only thing I learned so far about this problem is to switch off audio in the ram preview pane to get an instan green bar progress, instead of the hated ‘locking existing frames’ with a processor clogged at 100%.
Also, try to preview with the spacebar!