Ram Issues with Affter Effects CS4

[Walter Soyka]

Skip the graphics card; AE won’t benefit from it — it renders with the CPU.

HDV and h264 don’t work well in AE; use the uncompressed files you’ve made for Keylight instead of the temporally-compressed ones.

4 GB is the most RAM you can use with a 32-bit edition of Windows, but it’s still not a lot for AE. Make sure you have multiprocessing turned off, because even with 4 GB, you won’t have enough RAM to make use of it.

If you need more information on any of these, you can search through this forum for graphics card, Dave’s Stock Answer #1 (for more on HDV and h264 in AE), and RAM or multiprocessing; these topics all come up pretty frequently, and there has been a lot of good discussion on them.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Michael Szalapski]

Do not render out of AE as H.264. Here’s why from Dave LaRonde:

Dave’s Stock Answer #3:

Don’t use AE to compress files for final delivery. The various compressors are there only to make quick ‘n dirty files showing a project’s progress to producers, clients, the kids, etc. AE is incapable of doing multipass encoding, a crucial feature that greatly improves the image quality of H.264 and MPEG-type files in particular.

Render a high-quality file from AE, and use a different application to do the compression. Popular ones are Adobe Media Encoder, Sorenson Squeeze and Apple’s Compressor, which comes bundled with Final Cut Suite. Even compressing in Quicktime Pro is better than compressing in AE.

Making good-looking compressed files is almost as much an art as it is a science. It is NOT straightforward at all. I recommend asking a few questions at the COW’s Compression Techniques forum.

DEFINITELY don’t try to use H.264 files as your source footage in AE. Here’s why (also from Dave LaRonde):

Dave’s Stock Answer #1:

If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following — footage in an HDV acquisition codec, MPEG1, MPEG2, mp4, m2t, H.261 or H.264 — you need to convert it to a different codec.

These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.

In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.

(And Adobe agrees.)

If the footage you’re using in AE is an uncompressed AVI or Quicktime and you’re getting error messages, it could be a number of things.
I’ve used HD files in AE on my home computer with a 128 MB graphics card and only 1 GB of RAM…it’s not fun, but it does work. I haven’t tried using Keylight though.

Have you turned on Multiprocessing in the preferences? If so, turn it off.

Other people may have some other ideas for what might be causing your problem

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Dangit! Beaten by a few seconds…darn my 73 wpm skills!

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Walter Soyka]

[Michael Szalapski] “Dangit! Beaten by a few seconds…darn my 73 wpm skills!”

I consider it a tie — you get style points for correcting the typos in the subject line!

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Stephen Cordes]

Even doing all those things above your commie is not really cut out for after effects. Gotta be time for an upgrade. The moment you start doing anything more than the most basic of compositing and I’m talking really basic you computer will just shut up shop.

[Brandon Moore]

Thank you so much to everbody for such a quick response. What a great forum! To the last response. I do agree about the new system which will come soon. But I have been working just fine in After Effects CS2 for a while now. Going from AF to Flash as you can see on my website. It’s just now with CS4 I am having issues. So in the end.. get a faster processor? I’m starting to wonder for a quick remedy is to render the AVHC footage in Premiere Pro CS4 as a uncompressed Quicktime or Avi file and then go back to After Effects CS2 for keylight and effects..ect. Then use the new Media Encoder for final output? Is this new version of After Effects more of a ram/cpu hog? Thanx again!! Brandon

[Walter Soyka]

Brandon mentioned it was his first video, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with learning a bit before you spend a lot.

That said, the other posters are right on — this computer is lacking the horsepower you’ll need down the road. For now, you might find the experience a lot smoother if you downconvert all your footage first and work at a standard definition resolution instead of HD.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Brandon Moore]

Thank you Walter. I will now jump off my balconey! Just kidden..lol. Advise well taken and again..so appreciated. I will try and pull it off somehow and then down convert from there and start saving $$.

Brandon

[Stephen Cordes]

At the end of the day it comes down to what you can afford and everyone on here will tell you to buy the best you can afford first time which is certainly the advice I got when first posting. Oh and make sure your motherboard has plenty of RAM slots you are so going to need it. You want a decent processor and definitely a 64 bit operating system so that in the meantime before CS5 comes out you can at least use 4gb per core.

I do a lot of on the move work and my power horse of a laptop with 64 bit processor, 4gb ram (upgraded to 8) and a relatively decent dual core processor does me fine and only cost me £650 and with the added bonus of a firewire port I invested in a fast external hard-drive I can take with me to speed up access times. It’s nothing like my desktop indoors but better than most home users have, if you get my drift.

In the meantime, if you don’t mind waiting while you do a bit of render work, pre-render out footage, use proxies and pre-render ram intensive effects. It will be time consuming but you will instantly see benefits.

These guys on here are great and got me where I am today with the general set-up with equipment and workflow techniques.

Dave – sorry about the cold age typing, the cons of doing it on a phone!

[Walter Soyka]

[Dave LaRonde] “Specifications for Adobe Creative Suite state that you can only use a certain variety of AMD processor”

He should be ok; the specs require support for the SSE2 instruction set; the Athlon 64 was the first AMD chip to support it.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events