[Michael Linde]

I would like a bit of follow up with this. Are the MP crashes resolved with AE 8.0.2 (CS3), and the 8-core issues resolved by manually editing the prefs file to only use 4 cores (both documented on Adobe’s website)?

We are trying to determine if it’s worth upgrading the RAM in our Mac Pro systems from 4 to 12 or 16GB, specifically to set up multiprocessing. Here’s my logic, but I would like to know if anyone has it working in the real world already:

Although CS3 (and CS4) are not 64-bit, and cannot address above 3GB of RAM for the application itself, Adobe has done a few things that suggest a large amount of RAM is accessible to After Effects at different times.

Consider the RAM Cache setting. Since Adobe recommends keeping that at (or below) 60% of available RAM, in a system with 4GB, that means 2.4G is available for the RAM Cache. Tweaking this number to get as close to 3GB would maximize the RAM available to the application, so we’ll keep that in mind.

Next, consider multicore rendering. Mac Pro systems have 4 or 8 cores. Adobe recommends not going over 4 cores, and allocating 2GB per processor (core) for rendering when enabling multiprocessor render. This is a baseline of 8GB for rendering.

With those two things in mind, let’s start the math.

RAM totals
12GB Configuration:
8GB for Rendering
3GB for AE (25% RAM Cache setting) – leaves 1GB for the rest of the system

16GB Configuration
8GB for Rendering
3 GB for AE (18% RAM Cache setting) – leaves 5GB for the rest of the system

In conclusion, although AE itself cannot access more than that 3GB cap, by enabling multiprocessing (set to a maximum of 4 cores) and installing 12-16GB of RAM, you can have maximum performance out of AE in both production and rendering.

And that’s the argument for RAM