[Walter Soyka]

A couple questions for you: Are you running Windows or Mac? How many processors? How much RAM? How many drives do you have attached to your system? What kind of work do you do? What kind of footage files are you working with?

I think that the only reason for moving these folders from their defaults would be to increase performance. When you render, are your CPUs working near maximum load? Is your memory usage maxed out? If either of these is the case, your disks are not a bottleneck and it doesn’t matter where you store files. If your RAM and CPU usages are low during render, then redistributing your files and getting faster drives may help.

Personally, Image Cache doesn’t do me much good, because I never use standard preview (spacebar). It’s not realtime, and it doesn’t include audio, so I don’t use it. I always use RAM preview (0 on the numeric keypad) or shift-RAM preview (Shift key and 0 on the numeric keypad; it functions the same as regular RAM preview, but you can specify different settings to trade off between speed and quality).

I don’t think where the project file is located impacts performance; it’s not accessed much except during opens and saves.

I don’t have much personal experience with Conformed Media Cache, because I always use intraframe-compressed footage to improve AE’s rendering speed and reliability. The only items in my cache are PEK files (audio waveform previews) and a few CAF files (conformed audio files), so I don’t think I’d see much benefit from relocating this folder.

Take a peek in your cache folder; if there’s a lot of video, you might relocate it to a footage drive, but again, disk speed may not be your rendering bottleneck.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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[Walter Soyka]

RS-422 can easily run 100′.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Nina Bjer] “So then I’m just more confused of where to separate the project to different hard drives… “

In my experience, most After Effects users run out of processing power and RAM before hard drive speed becomes an issue. What kind of system do you have?

That said, the general advice (if you don’t have a high-speed RAID) is one drive for the operating system and applications, a second drive for footage, and a third drive for renders.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

I’m not really sure what you mean by “capture” or “preview” files — After Effects doesn’t really have either one.

Can you describe a little bit about your setup and what you’re trying to accomplish?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

One of the members of this forum had a similar situation to yours a couple months ago, and used several Roku BrightSign HD410 units, synced with GPIO. It’s a pretty inexpensive and very reliable system.

You can read the thread here — perhaps it will help you.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Sean Worsell] “Never thought to run multiple instances to take advantage of more RAM. So the program knows to access “un-tapped” RAM does it? That is, if one instance is using 4 GB, a new instance of AE will only access a totally different 4 GB? I’m assuming you mean you can render out half a comp in one instance, and the other half in the other instance.”

No need to do it manually — AE manages the other instances for you through multiprocessing. You don’t have to render separate parts of the same comp manually in separate instances; AE will render multiple frames simultaneously within the same comp.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Dave LaRonde] “Specifications for Adobe Creative Suite state that you can only use a certain variety of AMD processor”

He should be ok; the specs require support for the SSE2 instruction set; the Athlon 64 was the first AMD chip to support it.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

Brandon mentioned it was his first video, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with learning a bit before you spend a lot.

That said, the other posters are right on — this computer is lacking the horsepower you’ll need down the road. For now, you might find the experience a lot smoother if you downconvert all your footage first and work at a standard definition resolution instead of HD.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

[Michael Szalapski] “Dangit! Beaten by a few seconds…darn my 73 wpm skills!”

I consider it a tie — you get style points for correcting the typos in the subject line!

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Walter Soyka]

Skip the graphics card; AE won’t benefit from it — it renders with the CPU.

HDV and h264 don’t work well in AE; use the uncompressed files you’ve made for Keylight instead of the temporally-compressed ones.

4 GB is the most RAM you can use with a 32-bit edition of Windows, but it’s still not a lot for AE. Make sure you have multiprocessing turned off, because even with 4 GB, you won’t have enough RAM to make use of it.

If you need more information on any of these, you can search through this forum for graphics card, Dave’s Stock Answer #1 (for more on HDV and h264 in AE), and RAM or multiprocessing; these topics all come up pretty frequently, and there has been a lot of good discussion on them.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events