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Unreliable performance on WinXP Pro
Here’s one that’s stumped the guys at Adobe, and is driving me crazy, so I’m hoping to find out whether anyone else here has experienced it. I have a project in AE (running on WinXP with SP2 on a 3Ghz machine with 1/2 a GB of RAM)that has 10 or 15 video clips in it, and 4 or 5 nested comps. This seems to be nothing that should tax the system.
When I’m building the next comp in my series, I can drag and drop a clip from the bin only once or twice. Then when I drag and release the mouse button, nothing happens. I can no longer drag and drop until I exit out of AE, reboot the computer, and restart AE. Needless to say this is hurting my productivity and driving me nuts. I’m not sure it has anything to do with WinXP Pro. We recently moved my license of AE from a Win2000 Pro machine (a much slower one), where it was running quite happily, with no quirky problem such as above.
The tech support guy at Adobe says he thinks he’s run into this problem with a couple of Mac systems, but all he could suggest was to delete the preferences file, which solved the problem (or seemed to) for about a day. Then it was back to “drag and drop one time only”. I am also using the recent update to AE 6.5, if that’s any help.
Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV -
4 Replies
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These types of problems sound like bad RAM to me, since they only occur after using the app for a little while and RAM usage grows.
Or … 512 MB of RAM isn’t that much nowadays. Have you checked your task manager to see how RAM usage is growing up to the point where the trouble occurs?
my 2 cents,
Steve -
Thanks Steve –
I’ll definitely test out that theory with the task manager in XP, and see if there’s a break point where the problem occurs.
Joe Bourke
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I’d definitely concur with Steve’s assesment. 512 MB is very little RAM on XP Pro. You have to understand that even a view “simple” videos can easily amount to massive RAM consumption – AE will try to hold as many frames as long as possible in the RAM. This is even more true for nested comps since quite obviously the cannot be directly scrubbed from disc and each frame needs to be calculated. Have you considered using proxies and pre-rendering to minimize those effects?
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Actually, because of your suggestions, I’ve dragged our IT guy in by his ear, and made him sit and watch the bad news in Task Manager. His immediate reply was “You need another GIG of RAM!”. Now all I have to do is convince the head of our department to spring for it, which I’m 90% sure he will; he is willing to listen to reason, especially when my PC is being unresponsive. Thanks for the help. I’ll let you know if/when the problem goes away.
Joe Bourke
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