Re: AE on new Mac Pro Quad-Core painfully slow

i would go ahead and set the preference file's max processors values back to the default '0'. you would only need to use that hack to limit the number of cores used, not to tell ae to use all of them, it will try to do that automatically. i'm not sure it would be causing any prblems, but it's only necessary if you wan to prevent ae from using all 8 cores.

you might also set the max ram back the to the default 60% and disable disk cache. see if that has any effect on the render/preview speed. (adobe recommends not exceeding 60% max ram cache, and disk cache with only one hard drive as boot and media may reduce performance).

are you seeing slow downs on all comps, or just specific comps? it may be taht you are using footage in some of the comps that has temporal compression (like hdv, mpeg, dvcprohd, h.264...). that will give ae fits.

also, as russ mentions, you are not running ae under rosetta, right? you can check that by selecting the application in the finder, then choosing file>get info. there is a check box option to runn the application under rosetta. make sure that is unchecked, or you will take a performance hit. on occasion it is useful to use this option to gain acces to older powerpc only effects and codecs, but you would rather not have to run ae that way too often, or it will run about as fast as your g5.

at work we have a newer 8-core macpro (12gb), a 4-core macpro (6gb), and dual g5 (4gb), and the render speeds are night and day between each of them. i didn't get too fancy with the ram cache settings, and use a modest disk cache and separate sata media drives for each. onthe mcapros i did limite the number of cores with the preference hack to a ratio of 2gb of ram per core, and everyting works quite well for us.

so i hope we can get yours working well for you too...

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW