Please help me understand this :(

[Brian Lynn]

I have 2 internal 3 Tera Byte RAID5 arrays built from (3)7500rpm SATA HDDs and two Adaptec RAID cards, 3405 I think is the card number. I also have 2 10,000 rpm system drives (mirrored). One raid for content, one raid to render to, and the system drive… 1080p content has been easy. I’ve worked with some footage off a RED ONE as well. I edit/touch up the Eos 5D Mark II footage a lot, and a ton of P2 stuff from HVX-200 cameras as well. And the whole setup was very inexpensive relatively speaking. The rest of my machine is a Core2Duo 3ghz CPU with 8gb of RAM. If I hadn’t of maxed my MoBo RAM limit I would go to a QuadCore but I’d lose RAM per Core and I believe performance would suffer. I don’t get a lot of RAM preview time, but I deal with it. I just watch small chunks at a time!

I built this machine to create super widescreen content for blended projection delivery. I work in some massive pixel spaces the biggest so far being about 4736×1080 (three HD projectors on one screen with a 256 pixel blended area). The machine handles it all. Playback of that content is another issue for another forum though!

I’ve suffered a few drive failures but the RAID5 setup has pulled me though with flying colors.

I’m sure my power supply hates me!

I am SO happy to hear the next version of AE is 64bit! That’s exciting!

[Richie Tovell]

Using an SSD as your main drive for your OS and apps will give you a big speed boost opening and running applications, but since your renders are running your processors at capacity, reading and writing footage faster won’t help you render any faster.

It’s this speed boost that I need, I don’t mind the preview length being limited or the long render times if I’m honest, what ‘s really killing me is the Ram Preview time 🙁 I just can’t work with it as it is, I make a few tweaks and adjustments to an effect, then I have to wait ages for the preview, this is in fact what I’m spending most of my time doing, waiting for my projects to ram preview 🙁 (More so than actually working on them!

Both my processor speed and read/write speeds are painfully slow. How do I fix this, will moving to a quad core processor help optimize the Ram Preview or will it help more with Rendering time?

From what your saying I gather that a Raid Array (even without SSD’s) will boost the run time of the app also, these are then the two areas I need to address most urgently, am I right in thinking that a quad core will do this?

[Richie Tovell]

Brian, if you’ve got 8 gig, surly After Effects is leaving 4 gig redundant? AE can’t see more than 4 gig up until the point that it begins to render out when it opens multiple instances of itself.

Going to a quad core from a dual core must boost performance in system such as yours, no?

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Brian,

I work with one of my clients regularly on ultra-widescreen projects around 13,000 x 1,200 pixels — 15.5 megapixels, or about 7.5 times bigger than a single HD frame. Render time is often measured in days instead of hours, and sometimes becomes a design constraint.

Because of this, After Effects workflow, performance, and network rendering issues are really important for me. I share your excitement about the 64-bit version!

I should add that moving to an 8-core workstation with 32GB of RAM made a world of difference to me over my prior dual-core system — I imagine you would see a huge boost as well.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

[Richie Tovell] “I don’t mind the preview length being limited or the long render times if I’m honest, what ‘s really killing me is the Ram Preview time”

RAM preview essentially is rendering. When you RAM preview, AE will use its background processes to accelerate your preview, though it must all fit in the foreground process’s RAM. In other words, more cores will speed up, but not lengthen, your RAM previews.

You might benefit from some changes in your workflow. Read up on proxies and see if they apply to your projects. You might also check out Nucelo Pro 2, particularly the spec preview feature which continually re-fills the RAM cache as you work.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Richie Tovell]

Cool app 🙂

Thanks Walter, it’s true my workflow is part of the cause of my problems, I should use adjustment layers more to apply effects for a start.

My budget is going to go on a new quad, a Raid Array (Probably not SSD’s though) and nucleo pro 2, I think that app looks awsome!!

Thanks again to everyone.