no ram previewing cs3

[Steve Roberts]

Hmph. That’s weird.

Have you tried just dropping in some (non-HDV) footage and doing a RAM preview?
Have you opened activity monitor to show RAM usage when doing a RAM preview? Any clues there?

[Kevin Camp]

if you enabled multiprocessing, try disabling it and setting the memory and cache settings to the defaults… there is normally a stall when cs3 first fires up all the render engines for multiprocessing, maybe yours is getting stuck trying to run the extra render engines. and with only 4gb of ram, i don’t think you are getting many extra processors involved.

you’ll also want to make sure that opengl is not set to always on for previews… (if opengl is set to always on, it will not use ae’s render engine)

if it still has problems, try setting opengl to ‘always on’ and see if you can get a ram preview. if you can, then you are having an issue with ae’s render engine… and i would contact adobe with the issue.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Jonas Espinoza]

it does now work with multi-proc off… does that mean i need more ram?

and then to remember to turn on MP for renders, because that is a huge speed boost.

am thinking about asking for nucleo at work, any thoughts on that…

do you think this is a software issue (bug) or memory…

it shouldnt just choke on frame 1 during a ram preview though…

[Kevin Camp]

[espinoza] “it does now work with multi-proc off… does that mean i need more ram?”

that may mean you need more ram, 1gb per processor is recommended but the prefered amount is 2gb per processor, so around 16gb for your system…

[espinoza] “and then to remember to turn on MP for renders, because that is a huge speed boost.”

that’s interesting, it is my under standing that it is the same render engines… i don’t know why it would work for rendering a final render but not for a preview render… i would post on the adobe after effects forum, and see what they have to say about that.

when you enable mp, how many extra processors does ae say it will be using (it should tell you in the window below the setting)? with 4gb of ram i would imagine it is only 1 or 2 more processors, unless you set the ram cache very low or the disk cache very high… which could possibly be part of the problem….

[espinoza] “am thinking about asking for nucleo at work, any thoughts on that…”

nucleo pro work similar to ae’s multiprocessing, by creating multiple render engines for each processor, but it has some advantages… primarily it can be set up to render in the back ground allowing you to continue to work on a project. which sounds pretty cool. it will also want about 2gb per processor (not in addition to ae’s requirements).

[espinoza] “do you think this is a software issue (bug) or memory…
it shouldnt just choke on frame 1 during a ram preview though…”

this is the first time i’ve heard of this problem… so it’s hard to tell. you can run the disk utility on your startup drive to check for problems. you could also start-up from the osx install disk that came with the system and hold the ‘d’ key to bring up the hardware test. run the extended test to test all of the ram to amke sure there isn’t a problem with a ram module (note, this will take a while).

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW