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donjojohannes
Known Participant
August 2, 2017
Question

Maxing out RAM - Workflow tipps?

  • August 2, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 1048 views

Hi,

I have a new-ish 32 gb RAM system. I realize, I'm not up there with the pros and their server farms, but still, I'm surprised at how I max out my Ram (and get errors) when I put my CH scenes into AE. I can live with slugglishness (makes me feel young again, when I used CS3), but maxing out RAM (which in theory should not happen, because my Adobe CC should not chew up more than 80% as per "agreement")?

What I throw at my system:

I'm "guilty" of two scenes, 27 minute long, 4k res, 3 puppets in total that have a number of full body layer cycles. All this is imported as dynamic links into AE to receive no fancy effects but only 5 camera angles that switch back and forth to create a dialogue scene. Ok, I guess, that makes it 3D, but still. And I have some simple static 1080 graphics, that should add little to the load. But looking at my Task manager, the problem is not with AE anyway. AE has no reason to complain. It even gets it own SDD to cache. But it seems that CH running in the background is hogging the memory to provide the dynamically linked data.

What can I do, to get the system out of the red zone and realm of pop up warnings (+freezes)?

Workflow suggestions anyone?

note: If that was my the only episode with these characters, I'd just split scenes and make it more digestable. But I have 15 episodes with more than 7,5 hours of dialogue in total to work through and keeping things tidy would be nice. Any tipps welcome.

Cheers,

Johannes

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    1 reply

    D
    donjojohannesAuthor
    Known Participant
    August 3, 2017

    Troubleshooting (and failing so far)

    I tried to strip the puppets down to basically just head movements without any cycle layers. This brought the PSD files down from 145 mb to 2 mb. I just did visimemes. No other recordings. Then I imported into a new comp in AE (purged all memory).

    How did it affect dynamic linking? Not at all. Character animator still hogs memory in the dynamic linking process.

    oksamurai
    oksamurai
    Legend
    August 3, 2017

    I can ask the rest of the team for more specific advice, but to me it sounds like this is pushing what we're currently capable of. 4K at 27 minutes and 3 puppets is a lot of data - my usual recommendations for performance are merging non-tagged / extraneous layers, turning off head turns and dangle until you need them, lowering framerate, and lowering puppet dimensions/resolution. The "turning behaviors off" trick works a lot for me, where I'll toggle the eyeballs off for certain intensive behaviors until right before a final export, giving me a more bare-bones version of my character to comp in AE. But it sounds like for you that even turning everything down to the basics is still running into issues...

    D
    donjojohannesAuthor
    Known Participant
    August 4, 2017

    Sorry it's not working well for you. Indeed Ch does not yet take part of the memory-usage pref in AE/PPro etc.

    Because of way the animation is generated, in order to render a frame for dynamic link, all previous frames must be processed (but not rendered) first. These results are cached so it doesn't get insanely slow when retrieving frames out-of-order.

    It may help to split the scenes in Ch into shorter scenes, though as you've noticed each scene generates a new background process, so this is mainly helpful if you're not working with the entire 27 minute length at one time in AE.

    If you're willing to send us the project we can take a look and advise further, and it could help us find bugs in Ch.


    Thanks for your your clarifications and tips.

    Today I shelled out some money to upgrade my system from 32 to 64 gig of RAM. Being in the mountains in Italy, shipping will take a week (plus a 5 mile walk down to the valley to pick it up :-) ). When I get it I can report back on how it affects my workflow and I hope this will get me through the project. Being able to make minor adjustments through dynamic linking with only one instead of two long exports shoult save time that will offset the investment.

    If I still run into problems, I can send you the project. Thing is - being in the aforesaid mountains - internet is on a slow metered connection and sending large files is a last resort and over-night procedure.

    I'll let you know how I fare,

    Johannes

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