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need advice: more RAM or new processor?
I currently am running 512meg of RAM and use a Pentium 4 processor. I want to add another Gig of Ram and a dual core processor. Most of my editing in AE is with still pictures from professional photographers. I use the camera/3d effects quite a bit. Of course upgrading both would be best, but I can only do one right now, so which do you think would give me the best results? (my main issue is rendering lengths and buffer underrun errors).
thanks,
Jeff -
10 Replies
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For render time you’ ll want speed and processing power. For you that means a better cpu, dual core probably the way to go since you already have a p4. The bus speed is also going to play a major role here, as well as ram speed.
Increasing ram at this point will only allow you to render more into preview, but not much faster.
Cheers,
Vince
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Increasing your RAM to 2 Gig should be cheap and quite effective in giving you a speed boost. It’s always tricky to know when to add extra hardware, and when to upgrade a whole system. If your P4 is reasonably recent then it should be quite quick anyway – weren’t the very first ones 1.4 or 1.5 GHz? My vote would go the RAM …
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On another note: AE 7.0 has a lot more support for OpenGL accelleration. Depending on your card you might also want to look into that. I find AE 7 to feel a lot faster when working with 3D layers in OpenGL.
Bar3nd
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which do you think would be more responsible in eliminating image buffer underrun errors?
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Hi J.
I’ve never seen a buffer underrun error message from AE. It echoes back to the early days of trying to write to CDROM – Nothing to do with AE, unless you’re trying to burn to disc without rendering – which I doubt! What message exactly do you get, and what are you doing at the time?
Buffer underrun implies data is not being made available fast enough to your host process – let’s assume video playback system; though since AE does not try to play back video in real time if the data’s not available it’s a surprising problem.
By and large, for system speed, you’d likely want to keep your hard disc(s) defragmented, keep a good amount of spare hard disc space, and if at all possible keep your video and AE project files and temporary files on a drive separate from the system drive …
This sounds to me like an error that you may need to fix, and not one that additional hardware will resolve.
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OOPS! my mistake…the error message was actually something like “not enough memory to create image buffer..”
I found several similar threads regarding this issue, so I assumed it may have been a common problem, especially considering the low amount of RAM that I have. It happens when I try to render out section that has a camera panning and zooming over a ‘wall’ of pictures I have created. The pre comp size is 7000×7000, using around 100 pics from a professional photographer which was then brought into an NTSC D1 comp size where the camera was then used….
I will try again later and write out the exact error message if you want, but I am done working for tonight!lol.
PS
here is one of the threads of someone who had a similar problem, if your’e interested:https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=2&postid=729110&archive=T
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Sounds like you need all the RAM your system can use – which will be 2 gig. Even so, that’s a big pre-comp – are you zoomed is so close that you need that much for your final output ..?
Good luck with it!
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Yeah, I zoom in on one picture and then pull out wide so you can see a bunch of pics and then zoom in on another. It’s a pretty cool effect and I’ve done it before without any issues when I did using digital pics from a consumer camera, I think it has something to do with using pics from a professional camera. But even in the precomp I tried making a still frame of the whole thing and it still gave me the same error message, but I think I have found a few workarounds, but who the heck wants to use workarounds?lol
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what was the workaround you used?
I’m having sort of the same issue… -
One work around was to simply restart the computer…maybe it clears the cache or something…do a few advanced searches and you will find a few different threads on this issue. I think another one was to make some changes in the secret prefrences, but that didn’t do me any good.
Good luck!
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