More Ram = More Better, right?

[Bret Williams]

Considering a new box is about $2500 I’d quit buying the RAM since it isn’t helping and costs about as much as a new box. Ditto with apps like Nucleo.

Tell me though, what is this 30sec spot like? Why does it take 3 hours? I can’t imaging creating a spot that takes that long to render with the CPUs these days.

[John Nelson]

Thanks again, Bret,

The spot is an animation piece I put together with lots of things flying around, lights and shadows, motion blurs, bevels and the like. The first one took over 4. Then I got onto all that extra material I didn’t need and knocked off an hour. Something tells me, though, I’m still not seeing the horsepower this thing is capable of. Maybe a switch, preference, something. Anyway, I appreciate your comments and assistance.

Make money (and love, of course) not war…

[John Nelson]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the ‘encouraging words’…

What? No Partridge in a Pear tree?

Guess next time I create a monster like this, I’ll arrange for a long, quiet weekend with the honey at some beach resort, and leave the rendering home alone with the kiddos and hope reddy killowatt hangs around till it’s done.

The activity monitor just shows CPU activity, along with the other stuff, not multiple CPU’s, right? Uninformed minds want to know…

Make money (and love, of course) not war…

[Kevin Camp]

[John Nelson] “The activity monitor just shows CPU activity, along with the other stuff, not multiple CPU’s, right?”

it should show each cpu’s activity level. without cs3 or nucleo, you should notice that all cpu’s rarely ever reach the maximum intensity levels. with cs3 on my 4-core mac pro they will all reach the maximum level about 10-15 seconds into a render, and usually stay there with very little fluctuation. one exception is when i have to ‘export’ a dv stream for some very picky hardware, then the cpu levels are like multiprocessing is not enabled…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Steve Boultbee]

[John Nelson] “The activity monitor just shows CPU activity, along with the other stuff, not multiple CPU’s, right? Uninformed minds want to know…”

There are two easy ways in Activity Monitor to see how much CPU power your computer is using.

The first is to sort all the processes by the CPU % column. On your Quad, you’d want After Effects to be as close to 400% as possible. Since there are other processes running, you won’t get there, but ideally it’d be over 350% if you’re not running any other programs (excluding OS X itself). I have a feeling that AE is only running at 125 – 150% when you render.

The second method is to look at the CPU graph window. As I recall, you get to that through the Window menu. You’ll get a vertical bar graph for each CPU. The more the four bars are near the top, the more your CPUs are being utilized. With AE 6.5 and without Nucleo, you will probably see alternating bars spiking to 100%.

With Nucleo installed, you should see separate processes in Activity Monitor (on mine, they show up as ‘aerendercore’ in Activity Monitor’s list), and each of them should use close to 100%. The CPU graph would show all four CPUs at full utilization.

[John Nelson]

Thanks Steve,

Been trying to figure this out for some time. Your suggestions really help.

Thanks again

Make money (and love, of course) not war…

[Bret Williams]

[Dave LaRonde] “• A 3D comp
• Three lights: key, fill and backlight
• All layers accept lights and cast shadows
• Motion blur is tuned on
• Layers composed of stills (5000×3000) with multiple animated effects applied
• Video layers (HDV) are time remapped and have CC Force motion blur applied “

The comp I described earlier that was only taking 33minutes for 35 seconds of 720p 30 pretty much is what you describe, minus the large5000x3000 images. But it’s 3D, (with 3D seq nested within 3D sequences to create 3D models of cubes and house blue prints with walls coming out of the blueprint. Pretty much all the layers cast shadows and accept lights and shadows. Extreme motion blur on everyhing! But no CC Force motion blur. But I do have lots of stills with people cut out and sorta animated. Lots of cameras. Nothing is prerendered.

I wonder if he has an example online?