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render times
I have a mac pro 2 quad core 2.8 processor. I am currently working on fifteen minutes of 24p footage, with no effects. The only changes I have made to the original footage was an overlay and one auto color correction. It is calculating that the render will take five and a half hours. Isn’t this excessive?
The activity monitor reports only around 20 percent of my cpu is being used–but 1.75 gigs of my 2 gigs of ram is active. Do I need to change a setting in my computer to up the cpu usage, or is my relatively little ram causing the bottle neck? Again, it’s just a simple overlay and an auto color correct, five and a half hours??
Thanks for any input.
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2 Replies
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Make sure your comp settings match the footage and that you aren’t resizing it…. Also check to make sure RAM and such is being seen in your preferences.
Richard M. Harrington, PMP
Author: Photoshop for Video, Understanding Adobe Photoshop, and ATS:iWork
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another common bottle neck are hard drives… since your cpu levels are so low, it’s obvious that they aren’t getting data fast enough, and drives have the slowest data rate in the pipeline.
it used to be that with ae, you didn’t care as much about disk speed. but now with 8 cores working together i’ve started to see disk data rates interfere significantly with performance, particularly with high data rate media like uncompressed hd. this past weekend, i was working with a friend on a project, and in several comps we had many lossless hd clips getting composited without any processor intensive effects and we could get decent performance due to working off a usb2 drive (it’s all he had to work with at the time).
things you can do to improve that pipeline… ideally you’d like to have a separate drive controller for the main system drive that you would also use as ae’s disk cache (normally an internal drive and controller), then you’d like your media on another separate drive and controller (if the media was compressed, perhaps firewire800) and then render to yet another drive and controller (external sata, perhaps). this way you’d avoid data having to ‘cross paths’ for any of the operations that ae needs to render.
a more common setup would be a separate sata2 controller (via pci-e host adapter) and a fast external disk array (raid0, 5, 10 or 50 depending on needs) that would be used for both media storage and renders, keeping the internal drive and bus for the disk cache. it’s the set up i have at work, and i rarely have performance issues here.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
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