Steve Forde
Forum Replies Created
-
No worries – not stupid at all….
How big really depends on what you do, how you do it etc.
From a performance perspective though A Striped RAID configuration (I believe RAID 0,3,4,5,6 – all except 2 – RAID 0 being fastest) will give you the performance. As long as its not Mirrored (RAID 2 – which is more of a backup/failover solution).
It really then becomes how much disk you can throw at it. The more drives in the RAID array – the better the performance.
Since you are most interested in preview times, you have to look at your projects. Are there alot of source assets? If so – AE must read those from your disk, and it can fit only so much into memory. The more AE needs to read, the more your disk will be used, and the more a RAID will help you.
Keep in mind that Reads for previews are not as expensive in terms of performance as when AE writes files to the disk. There is a tipping point though – if you have alot of source assets.
Steve
Gridiron Software Inc. -
No need to correct – you got it.
Steve
GridIron Software Inc. -
No worries.
When rendering an AVI there are actually 2 different things going on. Rendering, then Encoding.
When Nucleo renders an AVI – all instances are used for the rendering portion (using all CPU), which then feed the one instance rendered frames to do the encoding. If as an example you had nothing to render, but just encode, then Nucleo will not provide any speedup, as it focuses only on the rendering portion. For reference though, its rendering that takes the most time – hence the Nucleo speedup.
Make sense?
Steve
GridIron Software Inc. -
The caveat being if your drive is fast enough. Key thing is – AVI, QT etc require encoding (however minimal). With Nucleo – only one instance can encode. In the case of TGA sequence – every instance can write those on their own. (meaning faster – if drive can handle it)
Steve
GridIron Software Inc. -
Short answer – depends.
Long answer –
If you use many source assets in your projects – this causes AE to do alot of “reading” on your drive. The good news is – reading is lightweight in terms of drive speed. There is a tipping point though. The more concurrent reads a drive has to do, the slower it will become.
RAID’s make that easier by utilizing the compound nature of multiple drives, and striping the data across all of them (reducing the thrashing of a single drive head trying to do too many things at once).
The real culprit are Writes. This is when things are written to your disk, and it is much more labor intensive.
I can’t speak to how AE CS3 does it – but I can say how Nucleo does it.
IF you render to image sequences – each instance of AE that Nucleo starts will write to your disk on its own. This makes things really fast – but only if you are on a RAID. The more CPU’s you have, the more instances there are, and therefore – the more frames will be written simultaneously from each instance. The bigger the frame, the worse the slowdown. RAID with fast disks solve this problem.
IF you render to movies all the time – with Nucleo – you don’t have to worry about writes. This is because movies need to be encoded, and only one instance of AE does the encoding in Nucleo’s world (same for AE CS3). This means that only one instance is ever writing to your disk. You will still need to worry about reads, but they are far less of a problem than writes.
Hope this makes sense….
Steve
GridIron Software Inc. -
AE CS3 uses technology identical to Nucleo “Standard”. It will spawn multiple processes of AE, and under the hood feed the other “AE’s” frames based on what needs to be done. This is how Nucleo scaled, and this is how AE CS 3 scales. The performance benefits are essentially identical between Nucleo and AE CS3.
This means that IF you have the RAM – Nucleo and AE CS3 will scale quite easily to 8 cores, and in many cases give you up to 8 X speedup. Again – IF YOU HAVE THE RAM. (using caps as you should really have at least 1-2GB per core = 8-16GB = $$$)
Nucleo Pro 2 does a whole bunch more than just use all CPU – https://www.gridironsoftware.com/nucleopro2
Also – when you have this many CPU – you need to balance HDD as well. If you have a single 7200 rpm disk holding the data (or god help you a firewire drive) for your projects, your entire machine will grind to a halt. You MUST use striped RAID to see performance on fast disks.
Please remember – when you use Nucleo Pro, Nucleo or just AE CS3 – on an 8 core workstation your machine is acting just like a render farm. 8 different instances of AE will need to open your project, read all the data, then start rendering. To see performance, you need to manage it. It means that CPU, RAM and Disk must all be singing in harmony or frustration will follow. Not to mention if you are PC – you cannot use Win XP or Vista 32 bit. You MUST use XP 64 bit or Vista 64 bit to make sure the RAM is available.
Overall, the hardware folks have decided that the more cores the better. When 4 was pretty much the maximum, it was manageable without having to really worry about it. Now that 8 cores are out, and 16 not far behind – we need to do some education.
My honest $0.02 – if you are at all technically daunted by any of the above – stick to a quad. Your stress level and wallet will thank you time and time again. IF you are adventurous and have some cash burning a hole in your wallet – go for it, but be prepared to spend some time tweaking.
Steve
GridIron Software Inc. -
Nucleo standard is NOT included in AE CS3. Adobe has added features to AE CS3 that are identical to our Nucleo fast render and fast preview.
We put that comparison chart up on our site as a reference to make sure that it was clear that Nucleo Pro is NOT included in AE CS3. We also put it there to show off the features we have added to the just announced Nucleo Pro 2.0 – https://www.gridironsoftware.com/NucleoPro2/
I can’t speak for Adobe’s method, but Nucleo and Nucleo Pro will see up to 16 CPU and use 32GB of RAM on a 64bit OS. Since what Adobe did in AE CS3 is identical, I don’t see why it should be any different.
Steve
GridIron Software Inc. -
Yep – go for the 4GB.
Steve
GridIron Software Inc. -
Unfortunately a quick google search doesn’t come up with results. I don’t recall sitting down to that exact motherboard either – so I could be wrong….but…
I haven’t seen an AMD chipset using the Nforce4 stuff WITHOUT the black hole. So odds are….
I routinely do demo’s on my laptop doing playback in Premiere and rendering in the background in AE. It will all depend on the project though.
Steve
GridIron Software Inc. -
Unfortunately, the black hole does have impact on how much RAM Nucleo Pro can use. We are still an application running in Windows. This means that we can only see RAM that Windows can see. If the black hole exists on that motherboard, the black hole will take the RAM away before Windows even boots up.
The key feature of Nucleo Pro (vs. Nucleo standard) is that you can work in other apps, and not have your machine eaten by AE rendering. Nucleo Pro will manage all the RAM that the 3 instances it controls (which are doing all the hard work when NP is rendering), and make sure there is a mimimum amount left over for others.
That said, if you have your RAM cache completely full in AE – as well as using 2GB in Photoshop, another 2GB in Premiere – well….the math doesn’t really help no matter what in that case.
You can also set Nucleo Pro to use less RAM, and less CPU if you find that there just aren’t enough resources to go around in your workflow.
Steve
GridIron Software Inc.