Optimum memory settings for AE CS3? Mine is three times as *slow* as AE 6.5 was….

[Kevin Camp]

first, i wnat to make sure you are not running ae under rosetta, select the appliaction in the finder, then choose file>get info. ther is a check box that says something like open in rosetta. that should be unchecked. there are some issues with cs3 and rosetta, ae does have a work around if needed.

the best way to test performance, is to have a common ground. here’s a link tobarefeats.com. they have actually has tested your mac (although loaded with 16gb of ram) with cs3 using a project called total benchmark (they provide a link to download it too). download the poject file (it is for an older version, so acs3 will tell you its missing something, but its not).

open the project and render it (there are two parts, just tell it where to render the files, note that one will render a sequence so make a folder for it). take note of the render time (this is just for testing against other settings), then quit ae and delete any of the rendere files.

now try pulling the prefs file onto the desktop… you’ll find it in users/username/library/preferences/adobe/afeter effects/8.0, the one you want is simply called adobe after effect 8.0 prefs. don’t delete it, just put it somewhere you can find it.

then start up ae, open that same project and render it… take note of the render times. since that was the default settings you don’t need to save them. quit ae.

delete the rendered files, restart ae, then set the muliprocessing on (don’t change the ram cache or disk cache yet), open the project and render again. take note of the render times… hopefully by now its looking better. quit and throw away the rendered files.

restart ae and try setting the ram cache to a value that will allow the multiprocessing to use all processors… ae tells you how many additional processors will be used in the multiprocessing settings. my guess would be a ram cache of around 1.2gb. leave the disk cache off.. for performance reasons its best to leave disk cache off, you may find that you need to turn it on for some projects, but deal with it that time. render and note the render times.

which is the fastest? now use those settings (you may even want to make a copy of the prefs, just in case you want to do more testing later, that way you’ll be able to restore the settings easily).

i think the total benchmark project file is for version 6, so you can test it in 6.5, if you’d like.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Bill Russell]

Thank you, that is a great answer! Hugely appreciated. I’ll get to work on that.

I’ll just say for starters (before I got your response here) that simply turning off multi-processor then jacking back up the ram cache to 60% cut the render time in half, bringing it to the same performance as AE6.5. Rosetta is off for CS3 (I just checked, thank you) so seems it should do better than 6.5 in this mode, but oh well. Anyway, off to do your benchmark testing!

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