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Ram Question.
Hi. Im have a question about AE and Ram. I have a 2 x quad core mac with 6gb of ram. When I render anything in AE it will say something like (50% of 3gb ram used) while rendering? Just curious as to why AE seems to recognize half the ram my system should have access too.
Also another curious thing…. I would have thought my system could handle a lot but it doesn’t seem to. for instance… I tried to do the “DIGITS MAN” tutorial and early on I had to copy and paste digits (with randomize style effects) to fill up the entire comp. No matter what resolution I have it on I can do this until I get half way down the page but if I try to go further all the text disappears….. Not to reload later once the processing has caught up, it just becomes invisible…. I can move about after effects and effect everything, its just not displaying my text, even in ram preview.
I wonder if this could be a graphics card issue, I probably need an upgrade or need to install a second graphics card… what do ya thinK?
Best Regards
Cyones 🙂
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2 Replies
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after effects is a 32-bit application, the most ram that a 32-bit can address is 3gb. however, cs3 (or ae6.5+ with nucleo) and a 64-bit os (like osx) can utilize more ram by using multiple instances of ae’s render engine (up to the number of processing cores you have) to help in rendering (both previews and final renders). each software render engine can then address up to 3gb of ram…
so, if you have 4 processing cores, you can run 4 render engines and each render engine can utilize up to 3gb of ram, for a total of 12gb.
to allow cs3 to use the available processors/cores, you need to enable ‘render multiple frames simultaneously’ in ae’s multiprocessing preference. once enable ae will tell you how many ‘additional processors’ will be available for rendering in the text bellow the setting. to gain more processors, you may want to make adjustments to the max ram cache size in ae’s memory settings, lowering the max cache may allow more cores to be used depending on the amount of ram you have (ae recommends having 1gb per core, i think the minimum is 512mb).
you can also allow ae to render the ram previews with multiprocessing by making sure that opengl acceleration is off for preview… you can set that in the preview preference, just uncheck the ‘enable opengl for previews’ option. if it is on, ae will use opengl rather than multiprocessing for ram previews (they are not compatible render engines). i’ve found that multiprocessing is much faster than opengl on a 4-core macpro, so don’t think you are losing anything by disabling opengl.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
To fix the text issue try creating multiple text layers instead of one large one.
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA
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