Please try recommended memory settings for After Effects CS5 and give feedback.

Anyone else have this problem?

Regardless of how much I tell AE to "Leave for other applications," it never fails to use up every drop of RAM until I'm left with a stuttering desktop and 17MB +/- of RAM left. This happened before in CS4 but I used Nucleo to get around it (although that sometimes still gave me problems). Recently switched to a brand new MacPro 12 core with 26GB of RAM. I launch AE and open my file (still 19GB RAM free at this point) and hit render. Mid-way through it drops way down to __MB. Other times, I'll work for a while, hit render and walk away. Come back when the render should be finished and it is taking twice as long. At that point, I need to quit out and restart AE and do a new render, then it is back to normal. Not sure what's up as I never had any of these issues back in CS2 or before but once I went up to CS4/CS5 it has never worked right.

Similar problem is during RAM previews of larger files. Hit RAM preview and it takes forever "loading projects" in the background. I read that it supposed to only happen the first time you RAM preview but it happens to me every time until I render something. If I turn off Multiprocessing, that immediately goes away. When I view the Activity Monitor, the individual render engines "aeselflink" are all open during the "loading projects" vortex so I have no idea why it continues to do it.

The most recent settings when I had the problem listed above with 19GB RAM free before launching AE.

RAM reserved for other apps: 11GB

CPUs reserved for other apps: 4

RAM per CPU: 2GB

Actual CPUs used: 7

Of course sometimes this happens while I'm working in other apps, but sometimes the only things that are open are Mail and Safari. I mean, I'm working with 26GB of RAM here! Shouldn't AE recognize how much RAM is available at launch and leave the amount listed in the prefs?

Am I the only one experiencing this?

an Forgetaboutit.

Message was deleted by: craulmedia

Thanks for all the good feedback. The results reported are similar to those we are seeing in-house.

After Effects is a deep product that gets exposed to many workflows, from web animation to IMAX film compositing. Because of this broad exposure, there is no one ideal setting for all rendering. The proposed memory preference settings are just a starting point with the goal of a better out of the box experience when the user first turns on Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing. These settings are what the user would experience with a fresh set of preferences.

AE CS5’s current memory settings are the minimums necessary for Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing. We are thinking of raising the default preference settings to those listed on Todd’s blog ( http://bit.ly/ckIriV ) so that more users get satisfactory results without having to first tweak the memory and Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing settings. They are not meant to be a solution for every type of project. If one is working in NTSC resolution, lower settings might be acceptable. If one is working with RED footage in complex compositions, higher settings will be necessary for best performance.

RAM reserved for other applications:
By reserving more memory for other applications there is also more memory reserved for the operating system buffers. This is beneficial because it stops the OS from swapping to disk during memory intensive tasks. If you find that over time as you work with a project that interactions are slowing down and taking much longer than normal, it could be that the OS is swapping to disk. Look to see if the hard drive light is flashing almost constantly. On the Mac, open the Activity Monitor  window (in the Utilities folder) and click on the System Memory tab. If the free memory is very low and the Swap used is high (over 500MB) and rising with each frame rendered, the OS is swapping. To alleviate this condition, raise the reserve memory setting in After Effects, save the project and restart the app. On the Mac, it may also help to restart the OS.

RAM allocation per background CPU:
We are also proposing raising the default background CPU setting from .75GB/ background CPU to 1.5GB / background CPU. The testing for these settings was done with a baseline of 1.5GB/ background CPU for Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing. This combination of reserving more memory on systems with generous amounts of RAM + higher background CPU memory allocations achieved successful, fast renders over a variety of real world HDV and HD projects.

Managing memory for Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing is complex. Think of each background instance as a mini After Effects. There are definitely projects that are going to require more memory per background CPU than others. For example, if the project will not render well with Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing off on a 2GB machine, it’s not going to render well with 2GB allocated to the background processes either. If you find this is the case, raise the background CPU allocation to a level that achieves the best result. In general we have found that web and NTSC work usually can be done with 1GB/ background CPU. HDV and HD work will usually need from 1.5 to 2GB/background CPU. Higher resolution work may need 3 or even 4GB/background CPU.


Please keep trying these proposed default settings with your projects and let us know how they work for you. Most importantly we need to know if they help reduce application slowdowns due to memory swapping, over the course of a day's work. That is the primary goal for the new defaults.

One note from our test set-up:

Our engineers do custom installs they had to check on drivers. long and short, be sure the CUDA driver is installed (properly).

That combined with the recommended settings ensures a real performance boost. Thanks for this Todd it was a mystery in CS4!

We're still working on combinations and continuing with plug-in testing which is where we see huge differences. We'll post what we find.

On my 8 GB system, Win 7, I've been running 1.5GB reserved with 1.5 allocated per CPU. Uses 3 CPUs. If I reserve 2GB, I only get 2CPU which is waste on Quadcore.

ok, just ran some test here with a small project that includes:
6 precomps of large images turned into 3d buildings, a couple of lights, couple of adjustment layers, camera with slow pans and moves, 1080p24 sized.

rendered to default best settings and lossless.

machine: early 2008 8-core 2.8GHz, 16GB matched ram, rendering to 3x750GB Raid 0.

numbers mean this:(ie: 4-2-4.mov, 4GB for other apps, 2GB per BG proc, 4 cores used.

MULTIPROCESSING OFF:
2min, 12sec

MULTIPROCESSING ON:
3-1-8.mov: 1min, 16sec
3-1.5-7.mov: 1min, 4sec
3-2-5.mov: 1min, 4sec
3-3-3.mov: 1min, 11sec

4-1-8.mov: 1min, 15sec
4-1.5-6.mov: 1min, 4sec
4-2-4.mov: 1min, 6sec
4-3-2.mov: 1min, 25sec

6-1-6.mov: 1min, 8sec
6-1.5-5.mov: 1min, 4sec
6-2-3.mov: 1min, 11sec
6-3-2.mov: 1min, 22sec

NUCLEO PRO 3:
1min, 37sec

I've been playing with multiprocessor settings on a number of computers, and I'm always noticing the same problem: when I try settings that seem reasonable, "Actual CPUs that will be used" drops to zero.

For instance, right this very moment: I have 12gb of RAM, 3gb reserved for other applications and 2gb allocated for background CPUs. If I try upping the allocation to 3, "Actual CPUs that will be used" now says 0. Which I presume means multiprocessing is actually disabled. Unless I'm misunderstanding what that means?

Hi,

I ran some quick tests on an older project (one of the only I have without lens blur and therefore one of the only where mp is not disabled).

It's 720x540, no video, all animated still images. Some fairly hi-res (2-3K), others only a few hundred px. Several adjustment layers over the whole comp for overall texture effects that really slow the whole thing down a lot.

These are times it took to render one second of the project.

1:44 (recommended settings)

1:18

1:05

So in this case the recommended settings actually delivered the worst performance by far.

I was confused about one thing in the explaination, when you mentioned setting aside all that ram for other applications, to me it sounded a little like that 6GB of ram is actually available to the foreground process of AE but not the background processes. Is this the case or is it really totally unavailable to AE?

BTW this is a 8-core Mac Pro 2.8 ghz, 16 gb ram, OS 10.6.4

System Spec's :  2.66Ghz 8-core (16 threads) Mac Pro 4,1 with 24GB RAM (4x2GB + 4x4GB)

Composition : 6400 x 720 pixels, lots of shape layers, feathering / blurring, Trapcode Particular, Fractal Noise.  NO source files or footage.

Only other application running was Firefox (light usage)

Results:

This pretty much confirms teh recommendations Todd posted.  In this case a VERY small speed increase was gained by allocating 1GB less per core, probably due to the comp having no source footage.  When I get time I'll run the same tests on a footage-heavy comp.