Memory problems on Mac running Avid…

[Dino]

For starters, almost no application, Mac or Windows will make use of more that 3.5 or 4 gigs of RAM.

Now, if on a fresh launch of Media Composer, choosing to create a new project, you are showing memory usage of more than 2 or 3 percent, something is wrong with your system.

If you are opening a very large project and run into this, you have too many bins open or the bins are overloaded. Only open bins are placed into memory. A bin with 17 versions of a 3 hour sequence will take a lot of memory. Splitting up your versions into a few different bins and opening only the one you need will greatly reduce your memory usage.

In the future please note the program you are running and it’s version number.

[Grinner Hester]

Because today’s Avids run so heavily on Ram, we can’t really keep photoshop and after effects open in every session like we are use to. Even in babying these new systems, you’ll have to reboot every now and again (in heavy projects, anyway) just to refresh things.
18 gigs of ram?
lol

[Niels Venrooij]

Thanks for the respons, I’m running Avid Media Composer 3.1.2 with a mojo SDI on a Mac Pro 3.2 Quad Core and I have installed 18 gigs of RAM… So that should be more than sufficient! With all my other applications closed the memory usage is around 70 percent on start up… So I guess something’s wrong with my system… The question is: What is wrong? Everything else seems to be working fine…

[Kris Anderson]

Even if you had the full 32 gigs of ram possible on the new macs I’m pretty sure Avid will only make use of 3 or 4. It doesn’t draw down on more ram as the project gets more complex.

[Niels Venrooij]

Maybe I just need to reinstall everything… Because on my laptop everything seems to be working fine… Although I only have Media Composer 3.0.5. Or could some plugin cause the memory leak… Although I’m not using any effects at the moments…

[Lawrence Nel]

Hi, I realise that thread seemed to taper off with no mentioned solution a while back, but was a solution ever found? As I’m encountering the same scenario. I just created a new project and it was at 21% straight away, although after a few minutes of not touching it, it dropped down to 9%??? Any words of wisdom will be greatly appreciated.

My System specs.
MacPro 5,1 / 2×2.4ghz quad-core intel xeon/ 8gb 1066 Mhz DDR3 / Matrox Mini / HDOne 7Tb external storage.