3 Replies Latest reply on Mar 13, 2011 2:51 PM by Rick Gerard

    Dealing with RAM maxing out during renders

    Molgaard Level 1
    Molgaard Mar 13, 2011 11:16 AM

      Hi all,

       

      I'm working on a laptop with only 4 gigs of RAM, so as you'd expect, rendering full HD footage with lots of effects is no easy task for me. When I render, the RAM usage will gradually increase until it hits 99%, at which point it will flood me with dozens of error messages and then crash. My very crude way around this has been to render everything to JPEG sequences, then when it gets to around 95% RAM usage (usually after about 100 frames), stop the render, shut down AE, restart my laptop, then resume the render from the same point for another 100 frames, repeat. It is as annoying as it sounds, and I just wondered if there was a more efficient way around this problem.

       

      I have 2.5gb RAM dedicated to AE, and I do not render multiple frames simultaneously.

       

      Cheers,

      Molgaard

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        • 1. Re: Dealing with RAM maxing out during renders
          Mylenium Most Valuable Participant
          Mylenium Mar 13, 2011 11:22 AM (in response to Molgaard)

          I have 2.5gb RAM dedicated to AE, and I do not render multiple frames simultaneously.

           

          But you may still be using a temporal effect or feature that accumulates buffers over time or large blurs and glows as wel las 3D features liek shadow maps. MP is a not so minor source of trouble, but not the only one. Anyway, without seeing your project, this will be shooting in the dark. I recommend you look whether you use such stuff like Timewarp, CC Force Motionblur, AE's own motion blur, shadow maps set to comp size when they needn't and so on. furthermore, you may consider substituting effects for others to achieve the same result. E.g. Box Blur is much more memory friendly than Gaussian Blur and there is even more potential if you use comemrcial plug-ins that are better optimized...

           

          Mylenium

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          • 2. Re: Dealing with RAM maxing out during renders
            Molgaard Level 1
            Molgaard Mar 13, 2011 12:55 PM (in response to Mylenium)

            I wasn't refering to any project in particular, but most things I make in AE do use a lot of those memory-hungry effects. I'm well aware that I should be using a more powerful machine for these tasks, and that such issues are to be expected. However I would never consider compromising the quality of my compositions in order to speed things up, so if I have to do things this way then I can live with that. I was only wondering if there was perhaps a quicker way of restoring my RAM (I know very little about these things) without having to restart my laptop every hundred frames.

            • 3. Re: Dealing with RAM maxing out during renders
              Rick Gerard Adobe Community Professional & MVP
              Rick Gerard Mar 13, 2011 2:51 PM (in response to Molgaard)

              You might need to change the default setting for purge frames. Start by holding down the shift key and clicking on Preferences>General.

               

              At the bottom of the list of options you'll see Secret. Go there and change the default setting for Purge Frames during render to something like 20 then try again. If that doesn't fix the problem check Disable Layer Cache.