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RAM, Rendering and Snow Leopards…
Hmm. How do I persuade AE CS3 to use more than the 12% of RAM it says it’s using in the render panel?
I don’t have any other programs open. What also confuses me is that it says it’s using “12% of 3GB” when I have 6GB installed.And finally… will Snow Leopard (when it comes out) improve performance?
Mac Pro, 10.5.7, 2×2.66GHz, 6GB RAM, GeForce 8800GT 512MB
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2 Replies
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RAM isn’t always the bottleneck. After Effects may be using 12% of your RAM because something else is the limiting factor—e.g., your CPU is maxed, your hard disk is spinning (reading source files or writing output frames), or one of your buses is saturated…
(It amazes me how much people seem to focus on making sure that all of their RAM is always full. It’s the great red herring with regard to this program.)
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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yep…
what you might want to look at is the activity monitor (applications>utilities) as you render. there you’ll see the ae process (or processes, if you have multiprocessing enabled) and you’ll see how hard they are working. if they are approaching 100% (or higher, depending on how you have things setup), then you are set up well and it doesn’t matter how much ram is being used — note it may take 5-15 seconds to get up to full speed.
if those values are consistently low, then you probably have a data bottleneck. that could be due to having mp enabled and not having enough ram to feed the processors, or it could be the data from the drives is not getting to the ram fast enough. some of these can be remedied with changing your cache or mp settings in ae.
as for a snow leopard… if you rely on your system for your work or livelihood, i would not be the first motion graphics artist on the block to get it. anytime there are updates/upgrades to things like an os or quicktime, i would always let others try it first and hear what they have to say about it.
from a few things that i’ve heard, snow leopard is designed to help the newest core i7 macs better utilize hyper threading on the new intel chips, and to better integrate cpu/gpu tasks with the implementation of opencl (bit different than opengl). i do think there will be other benefits, but i’m not going to rush out and get it until i hear feedback on stability with ae and other video apps.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
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