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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects Slow renders, After effects_CS5_OSX 10.6.5

  • Slow renders, After effects_CS5_OSX 10.6.5

    Posted by Ben Lindemuth on April 6, 2011 at 6:17 pm

    Hey there all,

    Tried searching to diagnose problem, was hoping someone could weigh in.

    My render’s have been going extremely slow lately. I am working on a documentary, doing additional editing and graphics. When I first started on this system, I did not notice any performance issues, but as we have moved forward, render times have slowly decreased, and as of late a few elements that I cue will not even begin to render out. I have another single core system at home that renders out twice to three times as fast.

    The only thing that I could think of is that we have been adding on additonal storage for extra media, however I’m not sure how that could affect AFX render times. Right now we have a 12TB Internal Raid as well as an external 4TB graid drive. OS is on an external 1tb Graid.

    Here are my system specs – MACPRO 2009 – Dual 2.26 – 8GB Ram – RADEON 4870_OSX 10.6.5_CS5

    I have used Tech Tool Pro to defrag and repair my os drive.

    Any Ideas?
    Apologies in advance if I’m missing something, or this is obvious.

    Ben Lindemuth replied 15 years ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
  • 2 Replies
  • Rich Kaelin

    April 6, 2011 at 11:57 pm

    I have been experiencing similar problems. At this moment I am doing a render, and I did several experiments for render times. I run dual quad (8 x 3.06GZ) with 12 GB RAM and raid arrays. When I turned multi-processing off, render times went up 4x, so I experimented and settled on 4 processors at 1.5 GB RAM each, which seemed to yield the best time. I have found that different effects utilize processors and RAM in different ways, so I have yet to settle on what settings are best.

    I will say that Macs do get bogged down after a while. A gentleman named Rafael gave me some advice on system maintenance a while back when FCP was crashing/bogging. It Helped a lot. It is a good idea to really “clean house” now and then. I think it is time for me to do it again. Here is the link to his post:
    https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/1105933

    In my view, it is a good Idea to just clean out and even reload from scratch, OS and all, now and then. The type of work we do generates a lot of files and junk that gets hard to keep track of and get rid of. The average Mac user does not have these issues. Also, even though it is a Mac, we (or at least I) sometimes install stuff that will run in background and slow things down, and then I become unaware that they are there and I do not need them.

    I hope others post advice on this, I could use it, I am far from an expert, just speaking from my experiences. Also (and this is from experience as well) a failing hard drive, and sometimes they still work when they are on the way out, will really slow things down.

    Rich Kaelin
    Kaelin Motion Production Services
    https://kaelinmotion.com
    New York

  • Ben Lindemuth

    April 8, 2011 at 5:47 pm

    Thanks for the tips – I’ll check try to defrag, and rebuild my system.

    Very strange. I just did a test render of this linked project – and it took 10 minutes to render with multi processing disabled. And then I moved over to a cloned machine of mine – exactly the same setup – and the same exact render took 2 minutes.

    https://www.box.net/shared/njnlggyro2

    I think a fresh install is warranted.

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