Steve Forde
Forum Replies Created
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Go for the 4GB. Nucleo Pro will use it. Each 32 bit process on 32 bit windows can use a max of 2GB. Since Nucleo Pro will start 3 processes (along with the instance of AE that you use), it will use up all available RAM.
The PCI express black hole is dependent on motherboard. Many motherboards that support the AMD chipset have the “black hole” – meaning that although you have 4GB in the machine – windows will not “see” all of it. You will be able to see in the BIOS how much of your RAM is going to the black hole.
Steve
GridIron Software Inc. -
OK – so I’m going to try and respond to all questions in one post…here it goes…
1. Adobe did NOT buy Nucleo. If they did, it would be illegal for us to sell it.
2. Speed. There are several factors beyond Nucleo that could cause a slowdown.
A – System Requirements. Does your system have the right hardware. (As in, RAM-RAM and More RAM). IF So – is the hardware available to AE and Nucleo? (i.e. – Is Photoshop, Final Cut, iTunes, Mail, Avid, Illustrator currently open and eating up all your system RAM?) This is usually the main culprit for poor system performance. The key to remember is – if there is not enough RAM for Nucleo to use – the first symptom is – poor CPU usage. (key point is – download demo projects from https://tinyurl.com/3937ao and test. IF there is no speedup with those – there is something wrong with your system)
B – Projects. Most but not all projects can be sped up by Nucleo. Key thing to remember – does the render actually need CPU? Many users do basic things that are really not CPU bound problems. In other words – if there is no “rendering” to be done – but perhaps significant “encoding” (making the movie format) to be done – then Nucleo will provide little benefit, as AE is not really working hard in this case.
Another case is temporally dependent effects. Plugins like Twixtor require information from frames across the timeline. In this situation, Nucleo will provide NO speedup.
C – Optimized effects. Some effects (not many) are already multi-CPU aware. If there is no CPU left to use, then Nucleo cannot go “faster” as all CPU is already in use.
D – Network footage. If you use footage that is on a network, yet your network is slow, please remember that your project will be opened X times (depending on number of processors) by the background AE processes. On a slow network, you will probably get slow results.
I think you get my point – Nucleo will eat your system. It needs everything you can throw at it to provide fast results. Nucleo Pro on the other hand is focused on being a little more friendly to your system, and will “play nice” with other applications and substandard system requirements.
3. 64bit and 8 CPU’s.
First off – Nucleo Pro and Nucleo will use up to 16 CPU’s as is. We designed it that way. Keep in mind that you would need around 32GB of RAM to use all 16. Also keep in mind how expensive 32GB of RAM would be.
64bit – Nucleo Pro and Nucleo can already address large amounts of memory. 64bit computing is all about memory addressing, and has nothing to do with speed of CPU. There is benefit in CPU / RAM interaction (which can sometimes lead to speed improvement), but not in the literal way that you suggest.
4. The price drop –
We dropped the price for a very simple reason. We have made a lot of money with Nucleo (A sincere THANK YOU). Plain and simple. I won’t cloud it with PR and diplomatic marketing speak.
We strongly feel that the Nucleo user experience gets dramatically better with Nucleo Pro. If we can get more people to have a positive experience with Nucleo (by making it super cheap), then they might upgrade to Nucleo Pro (making us more money – why we are a business).
I can’t get anymore honest than that. We want Nucleo users to upgrade to Nucleo Pro. We believe the value of Nucleo Pro to AE use is far beyond the original Nucleo.
There you have it – straight from the horses mouth (although I have a bigger nose than mouth).
Steve Forde – CEO
GridIron Software Inc. -
Since I had a thing for clusters some time ago – couldn’t resist….
PS 3 can run linux, yet as Barend pointed out – no AE on linux. I also wouldn’t count on that anytime soon. That said, you could run AE in Wine (Windows emulation on Linux), yet its emulation. In the case of the PS 3, it uses a cell chip (really a G5 with lots of little co-processors) which means its a RISC processor (Intel Chips are CISC). This means the windows emulation would really suck (as windows only likes CISC) = no performance / lots of crashes.
Therefore, your PS3 farm would only be good for…..gaming?
Although – anyone see a complete version of Aqua/Darwin/FBSD emulator for linux (also known as OS X)? I heard that OS X knew how to deal with RISC G5 once upon a time.
Steve
(A Guy who 4 years ago, seriously investigated putting together a farm of PS2’s and Xbox360 for real work but became content with just blowing things up) -
When you get a crash- is it just AE that hangs or do you see a kernel panic? Kernel panics happen when the whole screen goes a dim grey or black, and you see white text spitting out gibberish on either the right or left side of the screen. Only way to recover is to power cycle the machine by holding the reset etc.
IF so – then that is bad RAM.
IF not – please email us at support@gridironsoftware.com, and we can get you a diagnostic tool to help sort this out.
Steve
GridIron Software Inc. -
Please keep in mind that Nucleo Pro will use up all 32GB (we’ll leave at least 1.5GB for the OS) in rendering. How many frames you can stuff into a preview (the green line) is still limited by the 4GB of RAM that AE can use on Win 64bit. Using all that RAM though in rendering really speeds things up. RAM is the primary bottleneck with AE, then disk (how fast it can read and write), then CPU.
Steve
GridIron Software Inc. -
Well – IF that were to happen (I have no clue) – the theoretical limit of any 64bit app is 16 EXAbytes. …..kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta – EXA….
Who needs that much RAM?
“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” – Bill Gates, 1981
Steve
GridIron Software Inc. -
On a Mac – 6.5 will use 2GB, 7.0 will use 3GB. This is because some of the guts in AE changed (for the better!) between 6.5 and 7. AE is still a 32bit application (meaning theoretically it can address up to 4GB), and is limited to 3 due to limits set by the OS on frameworks in AE.
The 3GB switch on XP I highly DO NOT recommend, as its using technology in windows that was meant for servers – not desktops. Use at your own risk.
Steve
GridIron Software Inc. -
[jimmybee500] “So, if I were to opt for the new HP xw8400 that’s coming out soon, with 2 x quad Xeon procs, would it max out Nucleo’s power if I put 16GB RAM in there too?…Even though AE is still natively 32-bit?”
Yes. Just make sure that you are running Win XP 64bit. With this, we’ll use up everything you throw at us even though AE is 32bit. A nice side effect of Win Xp 64bit is also AE itself will see 4GB (great for previews!).
Steve
GridIron Software Inc. -
[jimmybee500] “I see on those specs though that they recommend 4GB ram? If XP only sees 2GB (3 with the switch) then does that mean that Nucleo will see and use the rest (even though AE can’t?)”
Nucleo and Nucleo Pro will recognize more RAM than AE. I really don’t recommend the 3GB switch for stability reasons, and we usually recommend at least 1GB ‘per core’. On XP we’ll use up all 4GB, on Win XP 64 and OS X – we can use up to 32GB of RAM.
This has a dramatic impact on the performance of Nucleo and Nucleo Pro, based on amount of RAM ‘per core’. i.e. if you have 8 processors X 2GB per core = 16GB RAM.
Steve
GridIron Software Inc. -
This is definitely strange. A couple of questions…
Is it Nucleo or Nucleo Pro, and which version exactly?
Did the clock of your system get set to 1969? There are issues with motherboard batteries dying and your clock getting set to some Apple engineers birthday (something like that…hence the Dec 7, 1969), but I don’t think this is the issue as the onboard battery usually lasts for years, and your machine isn’t that old.
That said, Nucleo or Nucleo Pro should not “break” due to the system clock being messed up.
If you are using the latest patch (the logs location changed between patches) – could I ask to zip up all the Nucleo logs and send them to support@gridironsoftware.com?
They are found in (Your User Account)/Library/Preferences/GridIron/Nucleo
This will give us a better clue as to what happened, and if Nucleo was the culprit.
Steve
GridIron Software Inc.