[Steve Forde]

Working on it as we speak. It should be out in a couple of hours.

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Steve Forde]

I would start with trashing your preferences. Uninstalling and reinstalling will not do this.

Easiest way is to hold down either cmd-option-shift MAC or ctrl-alt-shift WIN when you start AE. You will then see a dialog asking if you want to reset your preferences.

Steve
GridIron Software inc.

[Steve Forde]

I hadn’t heard that our software (GridIron Nucleo) would solve the problem, but based on your results I now understand why.

The key here is Rosetta is a RAM pig. It uses a silly amount of RAM just to do the most trivial of functions (it is doing all its code conversions and endian swapping in memory from PPC to Intel). Our product, and your method restricts the amount of RAM that AE is allowed to use, thereby dramatically reducing the RAM footprint that Rosetta needs to do operations.

Obviously Rosetta was not designed for huge memory applications like AE, so it runs into trouble when huge chunks of memory are allocated and essentially shuts down (therefore starving AE of more memory it thinks it should get – causing the buffer errors).

All this being said, I would imagine that your method should work for most eveyone that is encountering these errors. Many users may not be utilizing RAM heavily in the first place, and therefore not hit the issue at all, but anyone doing HD, 16 or 32 bit etc etc should find this a lifesaver.

Ironically Nucleo only solved this problem as a side effect of not trying to take too much RAM from the foreground instance of AE (Nucleo uses background instances), so we really ratchet down how much RAM each can access. (and therefore essentially follow your model)

Since the product is designed to optimize render performance (not provide stability on Mac Pro’s) I would recommend your method to everyone with an Intel Mac. Now if you want to run your CPU’s at 100%, thereby further reducing render time while still keeping your RAM cache maxed out for longer previews…..thats a Nucleo story….;)

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Steve Forde]

To tell the truth – haven’t tried that! Gonna give it a whirl and see if it works. Do you just literally double click on the system drive (thereby opening a window) and the inactive RAM gets flushed?

There is a command line call that you can use to flush it as well – but its strange as it is a disk check (nothing to do with RAM). I wonder if this call is used when the system drive is opened…..hmmm.

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Steve Forde]

I think there are 2 things at play here….

1. Fragemented RAM. Did you restart both machines before running the test? OS X has a nasty habit of not giving up “Inactive RAM”. You can see this in the pie chart (its the stuff in blue) provided by Activitiy Monitor in your Utilities folder.

What happens is, OS X will not provide the RAM to AE, even though AE will report the RAM as being free. Hence your 3% usage. Shutdown and restart usually fixes this problem.

2. Is everything equal on both machines? OS Version, Updates etc? I do know there was a memory bus update between the 2GHZ and 2.3GHZ, but I don’t believe that would be enough to cause this result.

As you can see, there are a multitude of factors that can cause slowdown or speedup. RAM, CPU and Disk, as well as restarts, updates and background process can all have an effect on render performance.

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Steve Forde]

It’s out, reviews have been great, and lots of people using it. We have issued 2 patches (so make sure that you are using the latest 1.0.2), and are currently working on a third (addressing issues as we become aware of them).

Is there something specific that you wanted to know?

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Steve Forde]

Here is how you can reset the Background Render Queue….

Macintosh:

– Quit AE
– Go to Macintosh HD > Library > Application Support > GridIron Software >
Nucleo Pro
– Now move the folder RenderQueue to the Desktop.
– Start AE again and try queuing and background rendering the project again.

—

Windows: (you need to have “show hidden files” enabled in your folder views)

– Quit AE
– Go to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\GridIron
Software\NucleoPro\
– Now move the folder RenderQueue to the Desktop.
– Start AE again and try queuing and background rendering the project again.

Hope this helps.

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Steve Forde]

[jimmybee500] “So does more RAM speed up RAM previews in the same way then? I was told not so long ago that previews was all Proc/GFX card intensive as far as speed is concerned and more RAM just equalled more frames to cache?”

Obviously things are stored in your RAM cache for previews, and that the more RAM, the longer the preview. While AE is building that frame cache (the green line) per frame, it is also building layer caches as well. This allows for potentially speedier rendering of subsequent frames if there is not much change on a per layer basis – frame by frame.

Therefore – CPU is really important, GFX card important only if using OpenGL for previews or renders, HDD speed is really important as it throttles how quickly AE can read source assets (important for both previews and renders) and write files to disk, and RAM impacts how easily AE can re-use cache when rendering previews and renders, as well as the length of previews. All 3 (plus GFX if you really like OpenGL) must be singing in tune for AE to work at its optimum.

Hope this makes sense…

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Steve Forde]

[Steve Roberts] “So how does this caching work in the context of the masks/effects/transform/modes render order? At what render stage is each layer cached?”

Unfortunately – it all depends. Plugins, layers etc all have impact. As an example, the cycore effects make heavy use of layer cache’s for its effects. Many of the temporally dependent effects out there do as well – meaning that if you were to say purge every frame (i.e. using the secret prefs), you wind up re-rendering alot of stuff that in terms of the algorithm of the effect, does not need to be re-rendered. This can have huge impact on render times.

This also shows that AE renders layer by layer by frame, starting at the bottom working its way up. AE’s caching is opportunistic, meaning that values are stored for each layer and frame, and based on certain criteria, AE decides whether to cache or not. I believe the decision is at the end of the render for each layer, then subsequently for each frame that these decisions within AE are made. (but don’t quote me)

CPU and Disk are also really important, and in many cases more important. I think the moral of the story for AE users is – CPU, Disk and RAM must all be working in harmony for AE to perform. Each factor has the opportunity to either really streamline, or completely bottleneck AE from a performance perspective, in pretty much every aspect of its operation. (Rendering, Previewing, using the UI, etc)

Hope that makes sense…

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

[Steve Forde]

[jimmybee500] “Exactly what effect RAM has on speed when rendering I don’t know. Anyone?”

RAM has a huge impact on rendering speed. When AE renders, it cache’s individual layers to RAM. It also creates an overall render buffer to more or less “save that for later” when each frame is rendered.

What this means is, the more information that AE can store and use again, the less it has to re-render things it may have already rendered before. It does all of this in RAM.

Therefore – the more RAM the merrier. Keep in mind the caveats (there are multiple posts on RAM usage in the common questions area) when on Win XP 32bit. Also keep in mind that AE will not use more RAM than it can see (again see the sticky posts).

Since “seeing RAM” is not an issue with our product Nucleo / Nucleo Pro – we benchmarked a Win 64 bit system with 4GB RAM doing a render at 13 minutes. That same project / same machine using Nucleo Pro with 8GB of RAM took 9 minutes. The only difference was “more RAM”.

Steve
GridIron Software Inc.