New Mac Pro. What's best settings for AE CS 4

#1

I have just taken delivery of new Mac Pro. It is a 2.93 dual Quad core, so 16 CPU’s show up. It has 16 Gb of Ram. I am running Snow Leopard 10.6.2 and AE CS 4. What I’d like to know is how best to optimize AE so it uses this system to the best of its ability. There are differing opinions on multi processing, OGL, etc and Ram amounts. My feeling is AE doesn’t seem to be maxing the system at all. It tends to use half the processors and never maxes them out. In comparison I render in C4D and all processors are maxed out.

My main question, is 16 GB of Ram enough or should I get a bit more. This machine is a beast but I feel AE just isn’t using the whole of the beast at the moment

all the best

Richard

#2

Well, After Effects CS4 on OSX is not supposed to be 64bit, so you can´t use more than 3GB of RAM. And for the performance CPU and RAM go hand in hand.
So if you want to unleash the whole power of your system you may wait for CS5 or take a look at Nuke/Fusion.

#3

The memory requirements do vary, but here are rough numbers that should be good starting points:

   For HD, you want at least 2GB for each process; preferably more. For 2K or 4K stuff, give each process the maximum (4GB). Because After Effects is a 32-bit application, each process can only use up to 4GB. But you can use multiple processes for rendering for RAM preview and final output. (WacomPirate's answer is misleading in this regard.)
 
 You almost always want to leave 1-2GB for other applications. 
 
      That leads to some relatively simple math to get you to a starting point. For your system, tell After Effects to only use 6 of your processors, and give each 2GB (or a little more) of RAM.  For longer RAM previews, go ahead and give the foreground process its maximum amount of RAM by sliding the Longer RAM Previews / Faster Rendering slider all the way over.
 
 But the caveats are endless. So this should be a starting point, and you can tweak and frob the controls for each job as needed. If you hit out-of-memory errors, then use fewer processors with more RAM for each. If you're working on tiny SD frames, you can use more cores with less RAM for each. And so on.

If you added more RAM, you could use six or seven of your processors with 4GB allocated to each. In this post, I basically say that cramming more RAM into your computer is the simplest way to improve performance with After Effects on a 64-bit operating system.

 See these pages for details:
 ["Memory (RAM) usage and storage"](http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS9F936D13-E76A-41e4-BF8F-577132AB4723a.html)
 ["Memory & Multiprocessing preferences"](http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WSDD65B476-971A-48e9-A5FD-D90E9A2B996E.html)
 ["RAM and disk caches"](http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS155A1BB2-BB32-4833-A079-F8396553D7B0a.html)
 ["Improve performance"](http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WSF13D6BED-C53B-408a-B2D6-C8B4205D4FB7a.html)

Don’t think in terms of maxing out processors or maxing out RAM at all times. Think about how to get the most work done in the least time. Consider, for example, that it’s quite often your slow hard disk or memory bus that is the bottleneck, and the CPUs are twiddling their thumbs waiting for some other part of your system to catch up.

#4

I just noticed that you’re running Snow Leopard.

Be sure to install the After Effects CS4 (9.0.2) update.

#5

Hi Todd

thanks for the very in depth answer. I actually let after effects decide and it came up with 6 processors with 2 Gb of ram each too. I am working half res 1280x720 and it is cutting through it nicely

I guess I will just have to wait for 64 bit then won’t I. I guess I could install a little mor ram and see how that goes too

all the best

rich

#6

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.