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ultimate AE workstation and problems…
Hello all you motion grahics gurus!
I own a five person animation and interactive shop in Philadelphia, PA. In the course of marketing real estate, we frequently do two minute commercials for the properties we’re working on, which include 3D animation, videography and a lot of motion design.
Recently, we were trying to render out a two minute reel I’d designed from our workstation we use for AE. That workstation runs Windows XP 64 bit, has eight gigs of ram, two quad core processors (not sure what speed; the machine dates back about eighteen months.) The system drive is an 80 gig drive with fifteen gigs free. There is an additional 1 TB drive, which contains all project folders and to which all caching from AE is referenced.
We have had a h*** of a time getting this file to render. It works fine while editing and previewing but, whenever, we’ve tried to render, the machine just stops rendering, AE becomes completely nonresponsive. It just quits. It tells us that it gets to about 82% or ram usage of a four gig total and dies. (I’m assuming that the 32 bit app can’t see the other four gigs of ram…)
Our only solution to this problem has been to render out the entire comp to frames (but we can only do about 750 at a time) and bring the rendered frames back into a new comp, add the soundtrack and rerender to uncompressed AVI. We then convert to mp2 and author to dvd.
My question is twofold. 1) Can this workstation be made to be reliable? or 2) What is the ultimate workstation, in terms of reliability to run AE on? We run a dual platform shop; I’m not opposed to considering the purchase of another Mac, if they offer significanly increased reliability.
My staff is ready to kill me!
Thanks!
Dave Hitt
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10 Replies
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Dave:
Thanks for responding to my post. It’s great that you noticed it; I actually read some of your other responses and got gutsy enough to actually try calling you at the station.
The footage we’re using is uncompressed Quicktime…We’re also having these issue with just pure animation we’ve produced, which only has a soundtrack and no effects…
As I mentioned, what seems odd to me is that the workstation is fine, in terms of previews and overall workflow. It only kicks when we try to render the project out. And, sometimes, it has rendered the project out to uncompressed avi, but only about twenty five percent of the time…
We have another large project incoming and I’m trying to determine if I can iron this problem out or if I should be looking for a new machine, and what platform that machine should be…
Dave Hitt
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Hey Dave:
I will test tomorrow and let you know. Much appreciative of your time…
Dave Hitt
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Hey there:
Unfortunately, OpenGL was already turned off, both in previews and in renders. Also, I couldn’t find any “secret preferences” on my Windows machine. Holding down shift seemed to do nothing. However, I was sure to purge all buffers before I rendered anyway, so I doubt that was the issue…
Oh well…
Dave Hitt
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Hey Dave:
Indeed I did. Nothing that I could find which related to this issue, when searching under either “secret” or “preferences” or both.
Today, however, I was talking to https://www.videoguys.com. Upon hearing that I was running Windows XP 64 Bit, he interrupted what I was saying and said,”I bet you’re having memory addressing issues when you’re rendering, right?” Apparently they’ve seen this issue many times with the CS3/XP 64 bit combo. He recommended I upgrade the OS to Vista 64 Business and upgrade AE to CS4, all of which I did today.
We’ll see…
Dave Hitt
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It sounds like you have quite a few cores and plenty of RAM. Are you rendering multiple frames simultaneously? If so make sure that your Memory Settings are correct (if you could post them here that’d be helpful).
If I were you I would set my Maximum Memory Usage at the default 120%, and my Image Cache (i believe is the name of it in CS3) to 50% or lower to avoid memory fragmentation.
Also enable ‘Prevent DLL address space fragmentation.’
Darby Edelen
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Hey there —
I will try all these things but I also ordered a copy of Windows Vista 64 bit today and CS4. It is my understanding that, with Vista 64, I will be able access more than just four gigs of RAM. The machine currently has eight.
Thanks SO much everyone for offering the advice. I very much appreciate it!
Check us out at https://www.splatworld.tv !
Dave Hitt
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i’m hoping that you got this fixed by now, but if you’re still having trouble, there were a couple of settings that you had that were most likely causing your problems..
as darby pointed out, your max ram cache was probably set too high. you mentioned in one post that the render used 82% of your ram, that means that your ram cache was set to over 82%. as darby mentioned you don’t want to go over 60%.
another problem was that you set your disk cache to the same drive bus as your media. you really want to keep those separate. set the disk cache to the main drive (boot drive) to keep the data flows for cached frames and media frames as clear as possible. if you didn’t have a separate external drive for your media, you wouldn’t even want to enable the disk cache (i suppose that’s why it’s off by default).
these recommendations hold true for cs4 too…
and just as an fyi, ae can grab as much as 4gb per core if multiprocessing is enabled (cs3 or cs4). so 8-cores x 4gb would be 32gb… i’m not saying you need 32gb, but 2gb per core is recommended for maintaining good performance. if you were working with 1920×1080 in 32bit/channel floating point comps, then maybe you could justify 32gb… however, if you just follow the above cache settings i think you’ll solve most of your problems.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
I will try these settings and test on the file that was giving me problems. Again, thanks for the insights!
Dave Hitt
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Just tested all your suggested settings. Kevin, the only thing I did differently from your suggestions was that I set the disk cache to a THIRD hard drive I have on this machine, rather than the system drive. My system drive is only an 80 giger with only about 15 free. I thought it might be wiser to use the extra 1tb drive I recently installed. Anyway, I tried rendering out the entire project I was having difficulty with and it rendered flawlessly!
Of course, yesterday, I had someone install 64 bit vista on this workstation, as well, so I theoretically will have multiple options. I have been told that cs4 and vista 64 work well together. We’ll see. I’m just glad that I made progress addressing the XP64/CS3 issues.
Thanks!
Dave Hitt
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I am looking to upgrade to a 64-bit machine and our IT dept. (yes, I’m in a corporate environment) says I need to use XP64 instead of Vista 64. I will be upgrading to CS4 also…
Should I bow out and let them install XP64 or fight for Vista 64?
Thanks!
Stephen Rutherford
Graphics Producer: Gale Force Media, CanesVision & Wolfpack TV
stephenr@carolinahurricanes.comCAROLINA HURRICANES: 2006 STANLEY CUP CHAMPIONS!
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