RAM NEEDED?

[Steve Roberts]

I got by nicely on a dual 2GB with 4 .5 GB of RAM with similar apps.

[Kevin Camp]

ae7 won’t be able to use more than 3gb of ram by itself (if you buy nucleo pro, it can use at least 2gb per core, maybe 3gb/core). however if you have more than 3gb, other apps can use that ram… so you could have ae and fcp running at the same time and they wouldn’t compete for as many resources…

i would, however, suggest upgrading to cs3. ae7 is not a universal binary and will not run natively on the macpro. it will only run under rosetta (powerpc emulation) and you will encounter frequent ae issues particularly with the cc effects and opengl accelerated effects. if you do upgrade, cs3 can utilize 2-3gb of ram per core. so if you have a 4-core macpro you can utilize 8-12gb of ram.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Raymond Tuquero]

Thanks

We are also thinking about upgrading to CS3 but not the Production Suite … just AE. And we also want the Design Set as well, Photoshop/Illustrator/inDesign. I appreciate the info. That truly helps.

-Thanks again-

-Raymond Tuquero-
Houston Editor

[Kevin Camp]

one last thing… if you are working in sd, ae will probably rarely use all 3gb of ram for caching during a render, so if you do upgrade to cs3 you may not get significantly faster renders by having more than 1gb of ram per core. if you are working in hd you probably will benefit from 2-3gb of ram per core…

i haven’t had time to fully test this, but i haven’t really noticed any difference rendering sd on a machines with different ram configurations ranging between 3-6gb…

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Jimmy Brunger]

Don’t know your exact situation Raymond, but I would hazard a guess that upgrading AE, PS, AI, etc would not cost much different to just upgrading to the full CS3 Production Premium?

*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3 / Mocha v1
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5 monitors / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0

[Raymond Tuquero]

Well there is a little of a cost difference. Money is not the issue for the company, but the fact I am trying to save them money, will be more trust in the fact I am not just buying crap left and right.

thanks for the info guys, We believe that until HD / BluRay become more abundant amongst our clients, I capture all of our HD footage down to a High Res Uncompressed 8-bit SD footage via the Kona Card. Works wonders that way. Get great quality with the Standard size. So, definitely made my mind up on jumping on the Mac Pro with 2.66 Ghz, 4GB of Ram.

But another quick question, Should I get 4 – 1GB Sticks or 2 – 2GB Sticks? … Would that make a difference?

Thanks again for all of you info.

-Raymond Tuquero-
Houston Editor

[Kevin Camp]

the size of the stick should make any performance difference, just a upgrade path difference.

if you don’t plan on upgrading the ram any time soon, buying the 1gb sticks may be better. if you end up upgrade the ram in 2 years, a 2gb stick may be 1/4 the cost that it is now. so even if you needed to max the ram out in a couple of years and throw away the 1gb sticks, it probably won’t hurt anybodies wallet too much.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Austen Mathieson]

wondering how I get this to happen, “ae7 won’t be able to use more than 3gb of ram by itself (if you buy nucleo pro, it can use at least 2gb per core” as I have 4gb ram, a duo2 cpu, ae7 and nuleo pro?

Please advise me, thanks guys.

Austen Mathieson
Austentatious Productions

[Kevin Camp]

if you have nucleo pro installed and working, then it should be grabbing more ram. what nucleo pro does is run multiple render engines (the ae render engines that get used if you set up a render farm… just the farm is the extra cores on the same machine). this is much the same way that cs3 uses multiple cores, although it sounds like nucleo pro is a bit more refined and streamlined and manages memory somewhat better.

i don’t have nucleo pro, so i can’t tell you anything about settings within nucleo. aharon rabinowitz did a tutorial on it about a year ago, you can find it by clicking his face on the ae forum page, and scroll down to a tutorial called nucleo pro. it may have answers for you.

the nucleo settings are separate from the ae preferences for ram and such.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Jimmy Brunger]

Gridiron Software (makers of Nucleo Pro) have aloads of tutorial/info movies on their site…

*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3 / Mocha v1
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5 monitors / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0