preferences>>memory & multiprocessing settings?

[Kevin Camp]

[Joe Daniels] “What would I need to set this to speed this rendering up on my machine?”

processing power is the most important thing in rendering speed. speed of the cores and the number of cores has them most direct influence on render performance in ae.

second is ram. the more cores you have the more ram ae can use. it can use up to 4gb per core, with 2gb per core being highly recommended. the more ram ae has to work with, the more constant the flow of data is to the cores. efficient flow of data to the cores results in optimal render performance.

third is the drive/drive bus speed. a fast drive and drive bus will keep data like video footage, cached frames and ram disk data flowing from the disk to the ram. the more efficient this is the better performance you’ll get particularly with large frame/high data rate files, like hd video. if you enable the disk cache, you should set it to a drive and drive bus other than the one that you media is stored on (if media is on an external drive, set the cache to the boot drive). by separating these on 2 separate buses, you can maintain better data flow to the ram and help maintain performance with high data rate media.

so, if you have multiple cores (and you probably do), enabling ‘render multiple frames simultaneously’ should speed up most renders. if needed, you can limit the number of cores to create a balance of around 2gb or more of ram for each core by setting the number of cpus available to other apps to a value that will leave you 4 cores for ae (9gb / 2gb = 4 cpus).

if you have an external drive for you media, then enable disk caching and set it to sue the main/boot drive for the cache. if you don’t have a separate drive for media, leave the disk cache off.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Joe Daniels]

Hey thanks for the info Kevin! I will try those settings when I get home! I do have a Intel Core i7 920 processor, so setting the value to 2GB per core will hopefully work for me!

[Kevin Camp]

i’ve heard with the core i7s you’ll see twice the number of virtual cores and actual cores in the multiprocessing prefs (due to hyper-threading being re-introduced in the intel cores).

and from what i hear, you should treat each virtual core as an actual core when defining to number of cores for ae to use. so with 9gb you’d like to limit ae to 4 (virtual) cpus (2gb per virtual core).

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW