hi Todd.

Glad to join the forum.

we have a station HP xw8600, Win 7 Ultimate, Intel Xeon 8 core, 64GB RAM, 3x1TB internal HDD, nvidia QuadroFX 4800, running CS5.

Disk configuration, as per your recommendation http://www.video2brain.com/en/videos-5353.htm, C: windows,apps,&cashe; D: footage& projects; E: renders&exports.

AE preferences configuration:

-/previews: Enable adaptive resolution with openGL and accelerate effects are both enabled

                texture memory is set to 1.2GB (80% of the original VRAM 1.5GB of our nvidia card)

                fast previews is set to OpenGL-Interactive

-/display: hardware accelerate comp,layer,& footage panel is enabled

-/media &disk cache: disk cache is enabled & set to 50GB

-/memory&multiprocessing: installed RAM =64GB

                                        RAM reserved to other apps =10GB

                                        render effects multiprocessing is enabled

                                        installed CPUs =8

                                        CPUs reserved for other apps =2

                                        RAM allocation per BG CPU =4GB (manually edited the pref file under text)

                                        actual CPUs to be used =6

Now the problem:

-rendering from the above station is only 10% faster than another station we have that has the same windows,same HDDs, but 16GB RAM runnig CS5.

and rendering from the above station (64GB) is only 15% faster than a laptop with 8GB RAM running CS4. very strange, i know!

for the sake of testing, none of the 3 stations used the render farm

PS: the media we work on is 30% SD 720x576, 50% HD 1920x1080, and 20% 2k35mm 2048x1556.

Please advice, as the rendering speed on this machine is not worth the price of it!

Sorry for the long post, i tried to mention most of the details.

Thank you in advance, and please let me know if i can provide you with any more info.

Thanks again.

Hicham signing off.

UPDATE: Okay, I may have figured it out. When I have Premiere Pro open (which I almost always do), AE is only allocated 8 of the 16GB shared between the two! I discovered this using the "Details..." button, which lists "MAX allocated memory" for each program in the Production Premium suite. Even when I'm not using Premiere, or if I'm only using it for minimal tasks, as long as it's open, it reserves half of all the RAM which is not "reserved for other programs." As soon as I close Premiere, my "Actual CPUs" jumps up to 4, like it should.

This also happens if I have Media Encoder open (although it only reserves 1/3 of the RAM, not half, but again, it does this even if it isn't doing anything). This seems by design, I suppose. I always thought shared memory management was a good idea, but siloing an arbitrary amount of RAM for each program regardless of their needs is a serious problem for me and people like me who multitask within the entire Production Premium toolset. I almost always start my day by opening up all the programs in the suite, even if I'm not planning to use each of them right away. I had no idea it was destroying my performance! I can stop that practice, no problem, but I often set up a render in AE and then use the time to do light editing or tweaking in Premiere. But now it looks like if I want to utilize even a minimum level of performance in AE, I have to close Premiere and go make a sandwich? Total bummer.

Why doesn't this memory allocation allow for preferences between suite programs? Even if we couldn't adjust it on the fly, it should still be a user-configurable setting. It is seems like Premiere and AME are not RAM hungry in the same way that AE is (and Premiere employs an AE process when using Dynamic Link, anyway). Shouldn't we have a "RAM reserved for other suite applications" setting as well?

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I have a dual-Xeon PC Win7-64 machine, 8 cores total with 24GB of RAM. Following these instructions should be simple for my setup, but the recommended values here do not match up to what AE is telling me.

If I leave 8GB for other applications, and allocate 3GB per CPU, my “Actual CPUs” reads as “0.” Even if I only allocate 2GB per CPU, I still only get 2 “Actual CPUs.”

In order to get AE to give me the recommended 4 “Actual CPUs” for my setup, I need to drop my “reserved RAM” all the way to 3GB *and* reduce my RAM per CPU to 2GB. Those don’t sound like good numbers.

I did recently upgrade my RAM from 12 to 24. AE does recognizes and use all 24GB of RAM just fine when not using multiprocessing, but these numbers just don’t seem to add up to the math in these recent articles. Is my machine still making these calculations and allocating RAM to background processes based on 12GB somehow?

I have no idea what settings to use in my situation, or what machine AE *thinks* it's running on. When I try to keep a high-ish reserved RAM and per CPU RAM, while still putting 2 or 3 "Actual CPUs" in service, my performance is not very good. So for now I am just using the recomended settings and experiencing results similar to a non-multiprocessing setup, and I can confirm that I do not have any background processes running under these settings.

This is driving me nuts, I hope someone can help me out. Thanks!

Message was edited by: The Noble Robot

System:

i7 930 on ASUS P6X58D-E MOBO

Overclocked to 4.0ZGHTZ, Memory on XMP profile @1600MHTZ

24 GB Corsair CMP24GX3M6A1600C9 PC#-12800, DDR3-1600

(C:)Intel SSD 160G2, with Win7 and other programs about 60GB free.

(Q:) Intel SSD 160G2, with CS5.5Production premium installed, 130GB free; used as disk cache AE.

(E:) WD1001FALS Internal HDD 1TB LINK to product page at NEWEGG

(T:) WD1002FAEX Internal HDD 1TB LINK to Product Page at NEWEGG

(U:) WD20 02FAEX External Enclosure 2TB, USB

(V:) HITACHI HUA7230 External Enclosure 2TB, USB

(F:) External Storage

(G:) External Storage

Clip used: 720x480 captured via Premiere-Pro to Disk

Footage from Canon GL2, 29.97fps

Clip: 5minutes, or 8990 frames. 5.41GB .avi file

EDIT: Rendered as Quicktime; 98% photojpeg codec

After performing nearly 80 renders of this file from After Effects trying out differing settings. I rendered with variations of:

1. two changes in the preferences dialogue; 2GB & 3GB reserved for Background processes, with 8GB reserved for other applications throughout the testing. 0 cores reserved.

2. two changes on the clip; with and without Neat Video Noiseware applied to the footage. finally settling on with noiseware only applied to clip.

3. HDD changes; from/to separate SSD's and from/to separate HDD-USB, and from/to internal HDD.

4. Finally I went back to the default CPU/MEM output of 2.8GHTZ and 1066MHTZ and tested  transfers: SSD to separate SSD and Internal HDD to separate Internal HDD.

Overclocked results:

2 or 3 GB for background processes mattered little. So I stuck with 2GB for the majority. Denoted where different from 2GB

(EXAMPLE for below; SSD to SSD: where file was (reading) and where it rendered-to (writing).

1. SSD to SSD ---------------------------5:42 2GB/background

2. SSD to SSD ---------------------------5:43 3GB/background.

3. SSD to External Enclosure ------5:45

4. SSD to (E) drive ---------------------5:43

5. (E) to (T) drive ------------------------1:53 (E:) has ½ the cache size and ½ the Gbps  of (T:) See link ^

6. (T) to (E) Drive------------------------2:10

7. (E) to SSD -----------------------------1:42  Fastest Time

8. (E) to External Enclosure ------------2:21

9. External Enclosure to SSD----------15:48

Default CPU Speed/ MeM speed: 2.8GHTZ 1066MHTZ

1. (E) to SSD-----------------------------2:31

2. (E) to (T) ------------------------------2:29

I understand the Thread is about render times with Changes in the A.E. dialogue but I thought I'd do a test with changes in Reading-from and Writing-to Changes. Now that I know where I can read fastest from and write fastest to I can make plans for copying assets into those HDD's and rendering from there, moving the final pieces over to Storage. Also with these transfer times laid out, I can make changes to the dialogue from here and feel comfortable that I am at least working outside the program as best as I can.

Cheers, tom

Oh my god - why can't my brand new imac 2.7ghz i5 with 12 Gb of RAM do a simple ram preview at 1/3rd quality - System memory says there are 8.78Gb of free RAM and have tried everything that makes any sense - please help.

Hi Todd, I modified this file and saved. However, when I open AfterFX CS6 it resets the values to the default.  Any suggestions?

C:\Users\mpowers\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\After Effects\11.0\Adobe After Effects 11.0-x64 Prefs.txt

Also, I there any scripting method to access turning on and off multiprocessing? (which I need to do quite ofter when it hangs with previews?)

nVidia Quadro 4000

CS6

Windows 7 enterprise

32 GB RAM

I was part-way into changing these settings in Ae CS5.5 when Ae crashed. Now it crashes everytime I open it .

After effects won't stay open long enough for me to reset the preferences.

- Windows 7 professional.

- i7 2600 quad core.

- 8 GB RAM.

Edit: I fixed the problem, and it's working fine now.

Message was edited by: El_Plates

I'm totally lost and reading everyone's numbers is giving me a headache; I'm not much of a techi but perhaps some one can help me who understands the research; none of the tables (easy to read for me lol) show my case not that I expect them to, here is my setup:

Intel i7 3960X 3.30 Ghz Sandy Bridge-E LGA2011

MSI Big Bang X-Power II X79 4 channel Mem

32GB Kingston Hyper X 1600mhz ram

nVidia Quadro 5000

I use one 480 Kingston Hyper X SSD for OS and programs one 240GB for Scratch disk

4- Seagate Baracuda 1tb 7200 rpm drives in RAID-0 for storage (additional drives for other projects and backup)

I'm using a corsair H100 on the cpu with quad push/pull fans and lots of fans in a Coolermaster Half-X 970 Case, I built this rig last year and have been fairly happy with it but every once and a while it gives me problems; I'm thining about getting more ram but perhaps my settings are not correct.  Thank you for your time.