RAM Allocation on MacPro AE CS3

[Darby Edelen]

AE is a 32-bit program living in a 32-bit world where the maximum amount of addressable RAM is about 4GB (1GB or more is reserved for the OS). I don’t know technical details, but I can tell you that your extra RAM will be useful when using the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously feature, and if you ever use other applications while you have AE open.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Todd Kopriva]

As Darby says, there are hard limits to how much memory a single 32-bit application process can access, but you can make use of all of your RAM with multiprocessing (using the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously option) in After Effects CS3.

Here is an excerpt from the “Memory usage and storage” section of After Effects CS3 Help on the Web:

“After Effects on the Mac OS X operating system can use up to 3.5 GB of RAM. After Effects on 32-bit Windows operating systems can use up to 3 GB of RAM; however, to use more than 2 GB in After Effects, you must configure Windows appropriately. After Effects on 64-bit Windows operating systems can use up to 4 GB of RAM with no special configuration.

Note: These numbers are for each After Effects process. The background processes used to render multiple frames simultaneously can each use the amount of RAM mentioned above.”

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Todd Kopriva, technical editor, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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