[Nicola Scodellaro]

Hi Kevin, thanks for your feedback! here’s my answers:

>> make sure you have the latest ae update, 8.0.2….

got it!

>> i’m not sure how much this will help, but there is an option in preference>display to enable hardware acceleration for interface elements, try enabling that (or disabling if it is enabled).

I already fiddled with that one without any discernible result…

>> there is also a preference file hack that was provided by adobe (so it’s safe)

I just tried this and doesn’t seem to have changed much in terms of time to launch the preview – which can be long the first time, ok, but still takes at least 30 seconds or more to begin even the subsequent previews. Also the thing that’s driving me nuts is that when I want to stop the ram preview and actually see it by pressing ‘0’ on the keypad, the beachball pops up and I’m left waiting for some 15 seconds or so.
Moreover, with the reduced processors a strange thing happened: the preview seemed way slower on the same comp I was working on before and ae stopped previewing after rendering less than threee seconds of comp, while before I was getting all the comp previewed.

>> you mentioned that you set the cache folder to a separate drive, is that drive on a separate controller than you media drive(s)?

my actual configuration is: media files on an external fw800 lacie drive, cache on the internal system disk – on which also AE is installed. I previously had the cache on an external fw400 drive, but things haven’t changed much since the switch. Do you think a third drive would help? I think I’m already out of controllers, though.

>> i’d also make sure that the system is seeing all the ram

System profiler says everything is ok. I installed the 4×4 gb plus the 2×1 gb that came with the mac pro following apple’s guidelines for ram installation to distribute the modules on the risers. I haven’t tried the hardware test yet, but I’ll let you know the results as soon as I have.

Some theories are coming to mind: could it be that because of the different brands of ram installed I’m getting this low performance in ae cs3? I’m planning to remove the original apple modules and see what happens.
Also, I repeat that I’m working with complex projects that involve with very big images, so I don’t know if the slugginess can be caused by this… things seem to get worse as I spend time on the project, so at some points every clic, every action pops a spinning beach ball. Moving keyframes even with caps lock on gets me 5 seconds of ball, as do many other seemingly simple things. My frustration comes from the fact that in this way the actual working is really fragmented and things get really unnerving given that I own one of the most powerful machines around, for the task. I know that my renders will probably be ultrafast and so on, but working like this is a painful experience!

[Nicola Scodellaro]

edit… I almost forgot the worst thing of all: it’s almost impossible to work with curves: the interface is so sluggy that I have to move the handles three or four times (with longer and longer lags) just to make a small adjustments. And this happens even in wireframe view or with caps lock on!
All in all, my biggest worry is that the upgrade from an iMac 24″ cd2 2.33 with 2 gb of ram is not so impressive from an interface point of view.