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Plenty of Ram & Processing power… AE isn’t utilising any of it
Windows 7 64 bit
8 GB RAM
Quad 2.6 GHz AMD Phenom II 810It doesn’t seem to matter how the multiprocessing options are set, what resolution the project is, how complicated the comp is or what format I am rendering, well under 4 gigs of ram is used and the CPU only runs at 30-60%. I would have expected them to be flat lining on a complex comp. Great for smooth web surfing during a long render, but no good for render times! Even Quicktime uses more ram when rendering.
Any thoughts as to what might be going on here? I know it could probably be any number of things but this is bugging me.
Thanks,
Daniel -
5 Replies
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It’s possible that the bottleneck is not the amount of ram you have or your processor speed, but your hard drive speed. Your processor could be waiting on your hard drive to write the data, therefore won’t need to be cranking away at full speed. Have you considered one of those PCI-E SSD Raid cards that can read/write data up to 800 – 900 MB/s (thats megabytes, not megabits).
Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com -
Thanks for the reply, Jon. Admittedly I am not running a raid system. I have separate source, destination, temp/cache and system drives but I don’t think that is the bottle neck since the HDD activity is also much less than I would expect. True, allot of the comps I work with call on many 3D layers and may be bottlenecked by disk speed, but even very simple one or two layer comps rendering to low data rate formats such as DV are not fully utilising available system resources.
On further investigation, this may not be an AE specific issue. I see the same results in system monitor when exporting from Red Cine and even when I play a 180P H.264 trailer in Quicktime it stutters despite low CPU and RAM usage.
Any further suggestions much appreciated.
Regards,
Daniel
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sounds like you have something rendering/processing in the background… perhaps a server process function? … ctrl alt delete and see what is procession in the background.
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Hi Joe, what do you suggest I should be looking out for? The processes all look pretty normal and none of them are taking any CPU time to speak of. If it were a background process causing trouble you would expect the CPU to be flat out handling that process but when I say AE is only using 30-60% I mean that is the reported usage in task manager for all processes, not just AE.
Cheers,
Daniel
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When you open open up AE… look at the applications being processed…. (via.. Ctl Alt Delete)… how many Aftereffects.exe are open? … should be at least 4 for a quad machine (or MAYBE 8 if a dual quad machine unless it is a i7 chip). If so, than that is normal and AE would not be using all the cpu capacity (i.e., no flat lining would occure… which is good). CPU useage should be runnning during a render at about 30-50 percent is normal. This is normal because AE is distribution the processing power over how ever many processing cores your chip has built into it.
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