RAM question

[Kevin Camp]

ae is a 32-bit application so it can only use 3gb of ram… with cs3, or nucleo, ae can use 2gb-3gb of ram for each processing core by using multiple instances of the render engine.

so if you have 4 cores, ae (or nucleo) can use 4 render engines with each using up to 2gb-3gb of ram for a total of 8gb-12gb of ram usage (i say 2gb-3gb per core because i keep hearing conflicting data about actual ram usage, in theory it should be 3gb).

if you have cs3, you need to enable multiprocessing in the preferences, and you may need to tweak the max ram cache setting a little to get all 4 cores to render… maybe setting the max cache to 50%. the multiprocessing pref will tell you how many ‘additional cores’ will be used, so you can change the max ram cache until you get the number of cores you wan’t.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Ian Corey]

I’d imagine that it’s topping out it’s usage at 3GB. Don’t know for sure, just backing up your hunch.

[Mike Mackenzie]

Thanks very much for the info! Forgive my ignorance but does processor = core?

Motion Graphics Designer / Art Director
Boston, MA

[Darby Edelen]

[Mike MacKenzie] “Forgive my ignorance but does processor = core?”

Basically dual core processors are a CPU chip with two processing units or cores on it (two processors for the price of one… only more expensive), quad core would have 4 processing units on a chip.

To add to what was said before, I would not recommend making AE use all the cores/processors available to your system for render. This tends to slow any other processes down significantly. I have a Quad Core (2x dual core) Mac Pro and I set AE to use 3 cores for rendering. This gives me a significant boost in render speed while not slowing other applications to a crawl.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Ian Corey]

With 16GB of RAM I could play my entire music library simultaneously!

[Andrew Zofka]

[Kevin Camp] “so if you have 4 cores, ae (or nucleo) can use 4 render engines with each using up to 2gb-3gb of ram for a total of 8gb-12gb of ram usage (i say 2gb-3gb per core because i keep hearing conflicting data about actual ram usage, in theory it should be 3gb). “

But this is dual quad-core, so it has 8 cores. So, to use all of them 16-24GB RAM is required?
If I have only 6GB does it mean I should use only 3 cores (currently AE is set to use 6).

[Kevin Camp]

i believe adobe recommends 1gb per processing core so you could get 6 cores rendering, by adobe’s recommendation. i can’t remember what the minimum amount of ram per core is, check the ae help file under multiprocessing, i think that is where i saw the info.

i currently have only 4gb ram on a 4-core macpro and 1gb per core works pretty well. as far as running other apps, i rarely do while i’m running ae and i rarely have problems.

from everything that i’ve heard nucleo pro is more stable and can use less ram per core, it also has cool extras like background rendering if you can get that (it’s cheaper than ram). i think there is still an issue with nucleo pro and osx 10.5 though….

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Mike Mackenzie]

Well, I just got off the phone with Adobe tech support who have informed me that the only time AE is capable of using more than 3gb RAM is for the actual rendering to files.

There is one option in the Multiprocessor Support preference panel, check this and that’s it.

Thanks t everyone for all the help!

Motion Graphics Designer / Art Director
Boston, MA

[Kevin Camp]

it will use multiprocessing for rendering ram previews too… (same multiprocessing setting in ae)

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW