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Optimal 8 core MacPro config for AE CS3
Recently I had a “problem” with rendering out an animation. It used large solids (10,000×10,000 pix) and effects like fractal noise. It took my MacPro about 14 hours to render out the animation, which was only 1 minute and 37 seconds long…. Is there a problem with my version of AE? I read something about a bug in Quicktime 7.4 here.
Or has it something to do with the RAM/CPU usage ratio? I’m using a MacPro with 8 cores at 3.0 Ghz. The system is equiped with 4 gigs of ram. In AE you can set the ram usage to a percentage. The lower the percentage, the more cores will be used. I set the ram usage to 45%, but AE used only 19% during the whole rendering process… Is that normal? And is there something like “a perfect RAM/CPU ratio”? I read something about the maximum of RAM AE can use here. Is it true that AE can use up to 3 gigs of RAM per core? I thought AE only used 3 gigs in total…My story may not be really straight forward, but I hope someone could help me. Thanks in advance!
Stuffy
student
Image and Media Technology
Utrecht School of the Arts
The Netherlands -
3 Replies
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[Stef Prein] “It used large solids (10,000×10,000 pix) and effects like fractal noise.”
With a 10,000 x 10,000 pixel layer you’re lucky it rendered at all. AE is happier with smaller layers, so the more you can split it up the better.
[Stef Prein] “Is it true that AE can use up to 3 gigs of RAM per core? I thought AE only used 3 gigs in total… “
On a 64-bit OS such as OS X each instance of AE is capable of addressing 3GB of RAM (the maximum that a 32-bit application can address). The multiprocessing option in AE boots up multiple instances of AE’s renderer. The limiting factors here are the number of processors your computer has and the amount of RAM it has.
If you have a total of 6GB of RAM (for example) and 4 cores you could set the % in memory & cache such that each core can use 1.5GB of RAM to maximize your RAM usage (1.5GB/core * 4 cores = 6GB RAM).
However, it’s generally not a good idea to use all of your RAM or all of your processing cores for rendering. In the above situation a healthier solution might be giving each instance 1.7GB of RAM, then a total of 3 cores can be used to render (since 4 cores x 1.7GB RAM/core > 6GB of RAM) leaving 900MB of RAM available for your system (6GB – 5.1GB = .9GB).
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
one other thing you could check is how the ram is configured… if you had installed the ram yourself, goto the apple menu and choose ‘about this mac’. click the more info button and select memory from the hardware details.
if you have more than 2 ram sticks, make sure your ram configuration on riser a matches riser b… i’ll make an assumption that you have 4x1gb sticks. your ram configuration should look something like this:
riser a-slot 1: 1gb
riser a-slot 2: 1gb
riser a-slot 3: empty
riser a-slot 4: empty
riser b-slot 1: 1gb
riser b-slot 2: 1gb
riser b-slot 3: empty
riser b-slot 4: emptyif you have riser a slots all full and nothing on riser b, you should reconfigure to match the setup above to get better performance. also, if you upgrade your ram at some point, keep in mind that you would like to have the ram sizes and configurations match from riser a to riser b for best performance. you can get the best performance if all slots are full (which isn’t always practical when you look at future expansion)…
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
My memory is configured the right way. Thanks for your information! I get the point of using ram effectively in AE. Thanks!
Stuffy
student
Image and Media Technology
Utrecht School of the Arts
The Netherlands
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