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

[Todd_Kopriva]

We just posted a new set of recommendations for memory settings for optimum performance for After Effects CS5, and we'd like to know how they're working for you.

Please read this blog post and then respond to this thread with your results:

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

[HichamHH]

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.

[em_T_hed]

Rendering 34sec worth of FullHD video took me 36min 7sec. Only using Warp Stabilizer and Unsharp mask.

Using an i7 2600K with hyperthreading and 16gb RAM DDR3 @ 2200.  2 SSDs in RAID0.

3gb RAM reserved for other applications

2 CPUs reserved for other applications

2gb RAM per background CPU

leaving 5 CPUs actually used

Is this slow or fast?

[Dan Ramirez]

I'm not sure that question can be answered without running the same project on various machines. The Warp Stabilizer is highly dependent on the source footage/layer.

[em_T_hed]

I forgot to say they are SATA III drives

[The Noble Robot]

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?

----------

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

[wonderspark]

Specs:

Mac Pro 3.33GHz 6-core, 32GB RAM@1333MHz, ATI 5870, Areca 1880ix-12 w/8-member RAID6

RAM reserved for other apps     CPU reseved for other apps     RAM allocation per BG CPU     Actual CPUs used     Time to render

8                                                  4                                               2                                                8                                 2:23

8                                                  4                                               3                                                6                                 2:36

6                                                  4                                               3                                                7                                 2:26

6                                                  4                                               2                                                8                                 2:21

These were the fastest times I saw with no other Adobe apps running, rendering identical Trapcode Particular RGB+Alpha movies.

[angevinII]

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

[El_Plates]

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

[Todd_Kopriva]

You can reset the preferences by deleting the preferences file. Instructions are here.

[El_Plates]

Thank you. good to know, in case I need to reset it in future.

[Iceking007]

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.

[Mr Tech]

I'm not sure at which point you are getting lost so I'll try to do a broad explanation. Basically, both After Effects and your OS (Windows or Mac) need a certain amount of memory to run without having to send data to and from one of your hard drives.

For example, if your OS is asked to do something with 6GB worth of data and you only give it 4GB of space to work with, it has to get the other two from somewhere, your hard drive (or SSD). So your computer will empty some of the RAM into your hard drive and fill the newly opened space with the other 2GB of data to finish its task. Since your hard drive (or SSD) is drastically slower than your RAM this will significantly slow down your computer because your RAM is spending a lot of time just sitting and waiting for your hard drive to catch up. Also, if After Effects is trying to access that same hard drive that will also significantly slow down your render because After Effects and your OS will be fighting to get their information sent and received from the hard drive.

So basically, these tables are just showing how much RAM they are allowing their OS to have and how much RAM they are letting After Effects have. The idea is to give your OS just enough RAM to not have to communicate with your hard drive. Depending on the programs you have installed and how many programs you have open the amount of RAM you'll need to give your OS will be different.

This gets further complicated by having multiple CPU cores. The other column you are seeing a lot is the amount of RAM reserved for each core. So for another simple example, you have 32GB of RAM, if you reserve 8GB for your OS (any program other than adobe programs) then that means After Effects can't touch those 8GB for anything. That leaves you with 24GB to give to After Effects.

This breaks down even further if you enable the "render multiple frames simultaneously" option. What this means is that After Effects will use each core of your CPU as it's own independant "computer". When you enable this option you then need to decide how much RAM you are going to give to each of those "computers". This is the other culumn you see "RAM allocation per BG (background) CPU".

Finally the "Actual CPUs used" column. Let's continue with the previous example and say that you gave 24GB to After Effects. You would then decide how much of the 24GB each "computer" (core) will get. If you set the allocation to 3GB then only 8 of your 12 "computers" will be used because 3 x 8 = 24. If you only allocated 2GB per "computer" then you would end up using all 12 of your "computers" because 2 x 12 = 24. However, it isn't going to be exactly 8 and 12 "computers" in these two cases because some of the RAM is being used for other things that I won't cover here. This is just to give you a basic idea of what all these tables are about.

I almost forgot, there is one more column that you see here a lot. That's the "CPU's reserved for other apps" column. Going back to the last example again, this is for if you want to reserve some of your "computers" (cores) for your OS and other programs. So if want to use 3GB per "computer" for After Effects which as mentioned above limits you to about 8 "computers" then you could reserve the other 4 "computers" for your OS.

So, now that you know what the columns mean, the purpose to this whole thing is to find out what the best way is to assign your RAM to get the fastest render times. This will be different for everyone based on the specs of their computer, whether or not they have any other programs open, why types of projects they are working on, what types of formats they are exporting to, and other things as well. These tables are here as a guide to give you a starting point to adjust your own settings. I suggest finding someone who lists a similar type of project as yours and start with settings like theirs.

I hope that was helpful and sorry if I oversimplified anything. I wasn't sure how much you already knew so I explained it like I would have to any of my friends who don't do a ton of techie computer stuff. Let me know if you need any more clarification too. Good luck!

[Mr Tech]

Hi Todd,

     I'm going to be running some tests to see how much of a difference RAM speed and latency makes with render speed. Is there any benchmark project I should be using to get more useful results to share with everyone or should I just list what's in the project I render? Also, where would be an appropriate place to post those results?