[Gollux] "If I am background rendering can I still get faster RAM previews, or are the two advantages exclusive?"
The two are exclusive to each other. You can run a fast preview while background render is running, but the current render will restart after the preview is complete. There are handy dandy alerts telling you what will happen to make sure that you don't restart a render by mistake.
[Gollux] "How much faster are the NP2 RAM previews than the comparable CS3 faster RAM preview type deal? Is there a preference in AE CS3 for getting the faster preview or does it shut off when NP2 is going? Everything is shipping by the way so I can't answer my own questions."
When you use NP2, it will ask you to disable CS3 multiprocessing. The main reason is, multiprocessing and Nucleo Pro use similar technology, and they could clobber each other (thereby clobbering your machine). In short, NP2 won't start if Multi-processing is enabled. Speed differences are a little more subjective. We have been hearing from users that NP2 is faster and more stable - but I think that could be just because they are used to NP. From a technical perspective, the approaches are similar, and should not be that different.
The primary benefit for NP2 is being able to render and work at the same time. The most gains in terms of time savings come from optimizing workflow, not how the processors are used.
In fact, our research suggests that most AE users could reduce their total project time by about a 2/3 if you didn't have to re-render frames every time you want to see something. Every time you move the playhead, it re-renders frames at all layers whether you actually changed the layer or not. Our commit to disk and precomp-proxy features are designed to specifically address this.
[Gollux] "How is the clunkiness factor if any with the switching interfaces between AE and NP2. It seems like anything I have ever used that involves a peripheral app, like Zaxwerks(maybe a bad analogy) has a clunky side because you mixing two apps."
We have gotten alot of feedback that it isn't clunky - but ultimately you have to be the judge of that.
[Gollux] "Can you background render in CS3?"
Nope. For a complete comparison - check out our comparison chart...
http://www.gridironsoftware.com/NucleoPro/Default.asp?Page=Product_Feature_...
[Gollux] "By the way ?..... My Mac Pro is shipping with 2gigs RAM 4x512MB. I am buying 4x2GB. I have heard that maybe I should not install the 512 chips. Any takers?"
As long as your chips are paired correctly - it won't matter that much. AE uses BIG memory segments for cache, and the issues about bus speed and RAM segmentation are a little less predominant than say running a web server with millions of little transactions. Therefore - if you have room - throw 'em in.
Hope this helps....
Steve
GridIron Software Inc.
