[Richie Tovell]

Cool app 🙂

Thanks Walter, it’s true my workflow is part of the cause of my problems, I should use adjustment layers more to apply effects for a start.

My budget is going to go on a new quad, a Raid Array (Probably not SSD’s though) and nucleo pro 2, I think that app looks awsome!!

Thanks again to everyone.

[Richie Tovell]

Brian, if you’ve got 8 gig, surly After Effects is leaving 4 gig redundant? AE can’t see more than 4 gig up until the point that it begins to render out when it opens multiple instances of itself.

Going to a quad core from a dual core must boost performance in system such as yours, no?

[Richie Tovell]

Using an SSD as your main drive for your OS and apps will give you a big speed boost opening and running applications, but since your renders are running your processors at capacity, reading and writing footage faster won’t help you render any faster.

It’s this speed boost that I need, I don’t mind the preview length being limited or the long render times if I’m honest, what ‘s really killing me is the Ram Preview time 🙁 I just can’t work with it as it is, I make a few tweaks and adjustments to an effect, then I have to wait ages for the preview, this is in fact what I’m spending most of my time doing, waiting for my projects to ram preview 🙁 (More so than actually working on them!

Both my processor speed and read/write speeds are painfully slow. How do I fix this, will moving to a quad core processor help optimize the Ram Preview or will it help more with Rendering time?

From what your saying I gather that a Raid Array (even without SSD’s) will boost the run time of the app also, these are then the two areas I need to address most urgently, am I right in thinking that a quad core will do this?

[Richie Tovell]

Thanks, I’m actually feeling a lot happier about this, the SSD drives are definitely the way to go for HD video work, I found that 8 or so relatively cheap 60 gig SSD’s in a raid array configuration will provide a read write speed of over 2 gig per second, with a total storage of nearly 500 gig.

Even on my budget the price of all those SSD’s is low enough to leave me enough cash to upgrade my processor. I will (as has been suggested) create three separate drives using the Raid array to further try to optimase my system also.

For now this is I think my best option.

I found this video interesting it’s about ram discs and SSD’s I didn’t know anything about them until a couple of days ago, now it looks like they’re going to be the answer to a lot of my problems.

[Richie Tovell]

Of course, running all that data back and forth on just one drive is bound to slow slow rendering time down, it never even occurred to me, presently I just use separate partitions.

On top of that, yes my cpu is constantly running up around %95 so a new cpu would have to be my first priority.

Rather than fitting extra Ram I think I’d rather add a couple of SSD’s in to the equation and see where it gets me, I’m sure they’ll help with handling all the HD footage, however I’m not sure whether After Effects would need to be running on an SSD as well to be able to benefit from such a set up?

[Richie Tovell]

Ah, I see now.

So what about using an SSD to store HD footage on, would that help? If so would After Effects need to be installed on the SSD as well?

I can see that I’ll need more processing for effects, but I’m starting to work with a lot of 1080p footage as well now, so SSD, will it do the trick?

[Richie Tovell]

Sorry if it seems like I’m asking you to repeat yourself.

It would be best for me to know this now before I commit to upgrading this machine any further. I was about to put 8 processors and 32 gig in this machine, from what I’ve read from other users this hasn’t made much improvement to render times. I’d like to ask, how would it benefit me to put this much processing and ram in my machine?

If adding more Ram can’t extent the available preview time I already have then in what way will it help? Would I see faster render times and faster Ram previews?

I’ve read that AE allocates 4 gig per available processor, with sufficient processors and ram available to AE surely we would see this resulting in 4 gig of Ram preview, no?

[Richie Tovell]

I gave it a shot, there are lots of little apps that can restrict processes to specific processors but the focusing problem remained and playback was still interrupted.

rendering the comp, then playing through a player in one window while working in another app may work… i’d have to test it at work, but i think quicktime will continue playing a file in the background.

I really need to keep “bouncing out” to an absolute minimum, that’s the whole point of slaving the audio app to AE, so I can work on the two in realtime without having to import and export or render between every adjustment.

Also I would no longer be able to see where specific keyframes lay in relation to sections of footage during playback or see where clips are positioned in the timeline etc, it would take a lot of guesswork to key the audio and video to their respective events on the timeline with much acuracey.

[Richie Tovell]

It’s cool Kevin, I confused the topic a little as well though.

I like the idea of assigning tasks to individual cpu’s, I think that I’ve seen a script that works along similar lines, I’ll look in to that, nice suggestion. 🙂

[Richie Tovell]

I Really appreciate your help Kevin.

Unfortunately the “Idle Rendering” function in Throttle didn’t work for me, as soon as I click anywhere inside or outside of After Effects the ram preview immediately stops playback, I need the playback to continue so I can mix the audio in another app which is opened on a different monitor.

I think you may have been thinking of another script, perhaps BG Render, this allows rendering to continue whilst other interactions are taking plaice in AE, I couldn’t get that script to actually work, but the creator of the script told me it doesn’t allow Ram Preview Playback to continue in that way, he didn’t think it was possible to achieve with a script either.

What I’ve done so far is I’ve managed to link After Effects to my Daw (Digital Audio Workstation) this means I can create AV compositions over two apps, working with audio and video simultaneously, the problem is After Effects won’t continue playback whilst I interact with the Daw.

I’ll give Throttle another test, it’s already installed but, If I can’t find a solution to this, I’m going to have to buy another PC to supplement this one, (which is perhaps for the best anyway) this way I can run the two apps in separate Environments, and After Effects will have to continue playback. .

If you can think of any ideas, it could save me a good $1000 🙂