[Walter Soyka]

Sorry to have misunderstood, but are you trying to use After Effects to make a TIFF sequence, or to avoid having to make one?

I don’t believe AE reads PPM files, but Photoshop does; you could use Photoshop’s Image Processor script to batch convert them. GraphicConverter is another option which might be a bit faster, if you are Mac-based.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

In the last thread on this topic, I suggested that you have 2-4 GB per core for multi-processing.

If you don’t have enough RAM to spread among your multi-processing cores, multi-processing becomes slower than a single core processing. What happens is memory starvation: once the computer runs out of RAM, it swaps some RAM out to hard disk to allow one process to work, then when the next process requests RAM, it swaps something else out to disk, and so forth, until something needs a piece of the original, already-swapped RAM; then it swaps something else to load back the original memory from disk.

Having free RAM is a good thing, because it means your computer is still usable. 4GB per core is the upper limit for what you could use, and you may stay well below that.

You mentioned your comp has only 1 layer of footage, so naturally the RAM usage will not be high. Add another couple layers, or another couple hundred (my last project had around 220 layers, and that’s modest by some standards — it’s amazing how quickly they add up), and you will see why I suggest so much RAM. Just to see, I have started re-rendering that project, and my RAM usage is hovering around 17-18 GB. That leaves enough free for me to have Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut, Mail, and a web browser open while I render.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Thanks for the update, Al. I’m trying to get a handle on the pros and cons of different solutions in this space, so I’d really appreciate hearing about your final decision. Thanks again,

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

[Richie Tovell] “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”

RAM preview essentially is rendering. When you RAM preview, AE will use its background processes to accelerate your preview, though it must all fit in the foreground process’s RAM. In other words, more cores will speed up, but not lengthen, your RAM previews.

You might benefit from some changes in your workflow. Read up on proxies and see if they apply to your projects. You might also check out Nucelo Pro 2, particularly the spec preview feature which continually re-fills the RAM cache as you work.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Brian,

I work with one of my clients regularly on ultra-widescreen projects around 13,000 x 1,200 pixels — 15.5 megapixels, or about 7.5 times bigger than a single HD frame. Render time is often measured in days instead of hours, and sometimes becomes a design constraint.

Because of this, After Effects workflow, performance, and network rendering issues are really important for me. I share your excitement about the 64-bit version!

I should add that moving to an 8-core workstation with 32GB of RAM made a world of difference to me over my prior dual-core system — I imagine you would see a huge boost as well.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

[Richie Tovell] “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.”

It sounds like you’re suggesting RAID 0 for your setup, which offers no redundancy. If a single drive were to fail, you’d lose all your data.

Also, many of the low-cost, low-capacity SSD drives were based on a JMicron chipset which performs erratically and unreliably. The only SSD drive I use and trust at this point is the Intel X25 series, which are wonderful, but pricey.

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.

If you’re interested in a RAID, I’d suggest getting a RAID system with standard hard disks from an established vendor like CalDigit or Maxx Digital (or any of the folks who advertise here — they are all good). You can get an uncompressed-HD-capable RAID 5 system which will offer you both speed and redundancy with great support from the vendor, and the price/performance still beats SSDs by a mile.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Whether a fast SSD will help you or not really depends on what sort of work you’re doing, and what resources are constraining you now.

Look your CPU usage while rendering. If your processors are working at or near 100%, then adding faster disks won’t help.

That said, I believe Adobe recommends three drives: one for the application and operating system, one for source footage, and one for render output.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

[Richie Tovell] ” 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.”

With multi-processing, After Effects will launch multiple instances of itself to render frames simultaneously. You will see a huge improvement in your render time if your renders are CPU-bound (meaning it takes longer to crunch the numbers than it does to read the source data and write the output).

If your renders are memory-bound (meaning you are working with many huge images) or disk-bound (meaning the CPU idles while your machine loads all the source footage), then adding processing power won’t help.

[Richie Tovell] “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?”

You’ve got 8 GB of RAM in a dual-core machine right now. That’s 4 GB per core, so you won’t see much benefit from adding more, unless you are trying to run other programs at the same time. If you step up to an 8-core machine, then you will definitely want to add more RAM.

[Richie Tovell] “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?”

I believe that RAM previews “belong” to the main instance of After Effects, which must also hold memory for everything else in the program, so you’ll never get all 4 GB for the RAM preview. This is one of the reasons why AE going 64-bit in its next release is such a big deal.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Al,

I was curious to see if you went with the HD210, and if so, how well the sync-over-Ethernet worked.

Thanks,

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

[Jon Etheridge] “Hopefully when I restructure and re-save the Photoshop file and re-rig the character everything will go back to normal. :p”

Good luck — if you ever figure out what the problem with the file was, I’d be interested to hear about it.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production