RAM Question

[Amit Zinman]

Red is pretty new. Usually for that kind of work you have specialized boards. You might consult with the Red bunch on this, I’m sure they will have some recommendation

[Kevin Camp]

yep, the red site is pretty cryptic when they describe the workflow and hardware. contacting support may help better lay things out.

but things you might want to try to help speed things up in ae:
– more ram, if you have 8-core macs, 16gb would be a good place to start.
– unless you can utilize extra hardware for decompressing the footage, export the red footage to a codec that does not use temporal (or interframe) compression like mpeg and h.264. image sequences are great, if you need lower data rates, test photojpeg at high quality (90-100) also, i believe prores 422 in only intraframe compression, but i’m not sure it handles 2k/4k.
– get nucleo pro, from all that i’ve read it will outperform cs3’s multiprocessing.
– if you want a fast disk cache, try building a small sata2 raid0. use a separate sata2 host adapter and an external enclosure with 2-4 small sata2 drives. a 400gb sata2 raid0 may actually cost less than 16gb of ram (but the ram will be much faster).

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Brendan Coots]

Some good advice, and here is my take on how to speed things up:

1. More RAM is definitely a good first step. 8-16GB will get those CPU cores working

2. AE uses disc cache to store previously rendered frames when RAM runs out, allowing it to re-allocate some RAM to render additional frames. Problem is, it is much slower than pure RAM-based previews, and After Effects will only use the disc cache if it is faster than re-rendering the frames (path of least resistance). So basically, as Kevin pointed out, your disc cache setup should be very fast in order to really make a difference. Either way, you should have enough RAM that AE rarely needs to rely on this to begin with. Having ample disc cache space is NOT a suitable replacement for adequate RAM.

3. Consider working with proxies until final render. You are possibly fighting needlessly with After Effects where a proxy would deliver perfectly acceptable “working” quality. Motion JPEG-B could work well for this purpose.

[Kevin Camp]

proxies are an excellent suggestion for ‘working’ workflow…

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Andrew Timms]

Thank you all for the advice.

I am reluctant to go the RAID array route when we already have a huge one hooked up to a fast fibre connection. It would be great to utilise that for disk cache some how.

Our 4 cores are all fairly new so I can’t see us getting an octi-core any time in the next year or so.

When using a proxy – do you still work in with the 4/2k resolution? I assume the key will still hold correctly etc etc (I’m not the creative – just the technical guy hah)

The CS3 network rendering looks so clumsy when compared to our Qmaster/FCP workflow. I will look into Nucleo – I assume you require CS3 licenses on all machines (we only have 3 CS3 machines)

Again, thanks for the assistance.

Andrew
Flyingfish.co.nz

Andrew Timms
https://www.flyingfish.co.nz

[Andrew Timms]

Just another thought – in regard to ProRes – it seems to work OK at 2k when using Color.

We are not using Redalert in our workflow, the ‘telecine/redalert’ people are converting the 4k & 2k/ DPX into Uncomp QT wrapped files for us to work with.

Andrew Timms
https://www.flyingfish.co.nz