[Kevin O’neill]

I work with a digital signage company and animate with AE CS3 on 2 systems:

– a 2GHz intel core 2 duo mac mini with 2gb ram
– a dual 2.3GHz PowerPC G5 with 5.5gb ram

While I haven’t done any specific benchmark tests, I’ve found that on average the mini renders about 1/3 faster than the G5. The only downside for me being the lack of support for a secondary monitor, but otherwise its been a powerful enough system to do what is needed, and does so more efficiently than a PowerPC with twice the ram.

hope that helps

[Kevin O’neill]

Aharaon,

Many thanks for all your informative and entertaining tutorials on the cow. All the best to you and your family!

[Kevin O’neill]

Hi Jeremy,

I wasn’t able to open your link, but it sounds to me like you’re suffering from the dreaded boomerang effect. Aharon Rabinowitz has 2 tuts all about it, you can find them here:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/boomerang_1.php

and here:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/boomerang_2.php

hope that helps

[Kevin O’neill]

Looks like some of the gurus beat me to it! sorry for the redundant response…

[Kevin O’neill]

Does it only crash during export or while scrubbing through to 9000 frames as well? Are you using “export” and “render” interchangeably here, because they are 2 different things…you can search the forums for an explanation – though I can’t recall the particulars I believe Dave LaRonde has posted in the past on the differences between the two.

I would try accessing the secret area of your preferences and purging every X frames (where X is a number of your choice). To do so, hold down shift and navigate to the “preferences” folder from your menu – if you’ve done it right, the last option in the preferences dropdown should be “secret”.

From here you can tell AE to purge every X frames during a render. This has helped me overcome crashes in the past. The downside is that your render time will increase if you are using time-based effects as they use previous frames to calculate how they’ll be applied to the frames ahead.

Hope this helps

[Kevin O’neill]

VisualHub is a great program for converting videos to various formats, .avi being one of the options available. I haven’t converted to .avi with it myself, however I’ve found it does a good, quick job of converting to and from mpeg-4/mpeg-2/wmv.

I know download.com has a version available – not so sure of what the licensing/limitations may be…