Ram Problem in CS4

[Kevin Camp]

ae is only a 32-bit application and as such it con only address 3gb of ram. however, with cs3 or greater, a 64-bit os (like osx) and multiple processing cores ae can use up to 2gb of ram per core for rendering. it does this by launching multiple render engines, one for each core. each render engine can grab 2gb of ram, so if you have an 8-core machine, ae can effectively use 16gb of ram for rendering and previewing.

however, the main ae application will still only use 3gb and that is what you see as it opens.

if you want to see the other render engines, enable ae’s ‘render multiple frames simultaneously’ option in the multiprocessing settings, then open the activities monitor (applications>utilities). you should see several processes called aeselflink, these are the render engines.

open a project and do a render (from the render queue, not file>export, ‘export’ won’t use the extra render engines). you should see those render engines all start working, it may take 10-15 seconds for them to all get going, but once they are going your renders should go faster, and you can monitor how much of the cpu’s time each render engine is using, along with how much ram.

note that there are some factors that effect multiprocessing. opengl rendering will disable multiprocessing, so you might want to disable opengl in the preview settings. also, 1gb per core will work, but 2gb is recommended, so if you have 8-cores, you might want to set 4 of them for other processes (in the multiprocessing settings). lastly, some effects will not work with multiple render engines, cc time blend is one i know of… it won’t crash or give you an error, it just won’t use the extra render engines for rendering that comp.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Antoine Dufour]

Thanks for you reply
I’ve made some test and with multiprocessing on, the ram preview goes faster.

[Mi Vaughan]

I have an 8 core processors but After Effects only see’s 4 cores.
I have an Asus P6T Deluxe mother board with the Intel core 920 i7 processor, 12 Gb of Ram and I am running vista 64. The graphics card is the new PNY NVidia FX1800 RT.

I tried to make adjustments in the memory and multiprocessor tab. I reduced the ram per core for 2Gb to 1Gb and turned off open GL preview.
Any suggestions?