Rendering with low memory workflow?

[Walter Soyka]

Can you talk about about your system? What OS are you running? What processors do you have?

First thing: with only 2 GB of RAM, multi-processing should definitely be turned off.

Assuming this is related to your previous post on the 3D buildings, I bet it its the depth of field in your camera that is killing you on render time. Can you disable DOF and fake it with some fast blurs instead?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Charles Ferran]

here at work we’re running a G4 Tower on Mac OSX 10.4
2 X 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
and 2 GB memory

I was thinking about doing that. I’ve just got it looking so sweet right now and I think faking it with fast blur will really make it look a lot more unprofessional :-/ would my render time speed up if I was to upgrade to 6 GB of RAM? we recently got approved for that upgrade and are waiting for it to arrive. So if that would help I would rather wait on the render and start on something else for now until it shows up, what do you think?

Charles Ferran
845-699-5270
http://www.charlesferran.com

“Far better is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure than to rank with the poor spirits who neither enjoy much, nor suffer much because they live in a gray twilight that knows no victory or defeat.”

[Walter Soyka]

[Charles Ferran] “would my render time speed up if I was to upgrade to 6 GB of RAM?”

Perhaps some; 6 GB is still not a lot of RAM as far as After Effects is concerned. With 4 cores, you really want between 8 and 16 GB of RAM to enable multi-processing.

With 6 GB, you could probably run two instances of AE at the same time; check out the Throttle script to limit the number of cores AE uses when rendering.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Charles Ferran]

mind if I quote you to my uppers when I ask for more RAM? 🙂

Thanks for all your help btw

Charles Ferran
845-699-5270
http://www.charlesferran.com

“Far better is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure than to rank with the poor spirits who neither enjoy much, nor suffer much because they live in a gray twilight that knows no victory or defeat.”

[Walter Soyka]

[Charles Ferran] “mind if I quote you to my uppers when I ask for more RAM? :)”

Of course not! I went into a little more detail on After Effects RAM usage in multiprocessing in this post.

But don’t just take my word for it. Check out Todd Kopriva’s blog post on RAM and After Effects performance.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Charles Ferran]

What I want to know is why Walter’s head isn’t floating above the AE Forum list 🙂

Charles Ferran
845-699-5270
http://www.charlesferran.com

“Far better is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure than to rank with the poor spirits who neither enjoy much, nor suffer much because they live in a gray twilight that knows no victory or defeat.”