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wasabeenut Calculating status...

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After Effects does not recognize correct system resources

Jun 29, 2010 7:05 PM

On my computer at work, I have After Effects CS4 and After Effects CS3. The computer is a 2x2.66 GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon with 8 gigs of ram running OSX 10.5.6.

Both versions of After Effects can only see/use 1.7 gigs of ram. My understanding is that After Effects should see as available 3 gigs of ram. (On the identical computer at home I can in fact see 3 gigs of ram.)

I need the maximum resources when working since I need to do longer HD ram previews. In addition at this low memory setting the software does not run right, with multiple memory crashes that should not be happening -- the kind of things that happen when you have insufficient system resources to run a program. I'm an advanced user who has been using this software for over 15 years -- it's not operator error.

I'm hoping someone has some suggestions of things I can do to alleviate this bug.

[As an additional note, the multiprocessing option is also telling me I have 16 processors, when I have only 8.]

929 Views 3 Replies Latest reply: wasabeenut, Jun 29, 2010 8:06 PM

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1. Todd_Kopriva,

Jun 29, 2010 7:45 PM in reply to wasabeenut

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> [As an additional note, the multiprocessing option is also telling me
I have 16 processors, when I have only 8.]

This is the easy question, so I'll deal with it first.

This a borderline bug. After Effects CS4 isn't able to take advantage of hyperthreading (which turns 8 physical processor cores into 16 virtual processor cores). However, it can _see_ the virtual cores, and it reports them as being there. Yeah, it's misleading. We fixed it in After Effects CS5---and we fixed it in the good way, by making After Effects CS5 capable of using the virtual cores provided by hyperthreading.

OK. Now for the harder question:

> Both versions of After Effects can only see/use 1.7 gigs of ram. My
understanding is that After Effects should see as available 3 gigs of
ram.

Please be very specific about what you mean by "see". Exactly what are your settings in the Memory & Multiprocessing preferences? (A screenshot would remove all ambiguity.)

Have a look at this page: "FAQ: Why doesn't After Effects see and use all of my RAM?"

Also, see this page, especially the first comment on the bottom.

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2. Todd_Kopriva,

Jun 29, 2010 7:47 PM in reply to Todd_Kopriva

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By the way, make sure that you've updated to After Effects CS4 (9.0.2). That update fixed a lot of things, including some crashes.

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3. wasabeenut,

Jun 29, 2010 8:06 PM in reply to Todd_Kopriva

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Since I'm most often required to work in CS3 for compatibility with others in my office, upgrading cs4 won't really help too much.

Also, CS3 is also identifying 16 cores. Not sure if this is the same bug way back then?

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