More Ram = More Better, right?
by john Nelson
on
Feb 23, 2008 at 6:54:49 pm
OK, so I installed another 4 gigs of ram, hoping my FCP, AE, PS, Etc. projects would zip right along to the finish line at blazing speed. Not so. So I'm sure there's a configuration or preference setting I need to change, right?
Case study #558548905: I rendered a 30 second animation in AE last week prior to installing the new stuff. Render time: 3+ hours. I installed the new stuff and, as a test, re-rendered the same project yesterday. Render time: 3+ hours. In observing the ram use in the render que, it indicates using 2047mb. The box came with 2 gigs installed. What's wrong with this picture?
Couldn't find anything in the AE settings, G5 settings (it reads the ram, btw) that allows change to occur. I'm looking here because I'm not sure where else to look... Also posted in a couple of the Apple threads, if that's all right...
Re: More Ram = More Better, right? by Tory Kendal on Feb 23, 2008 at 9:21:09 pm
In your case you're probably not seeing any improvement because your limited by the processing speed of your CPU. The ram just acts as a place to store open compositions, graphics and temporary render data instead of having to I/O them from disk all the time.
Re: More Ram = More Better, right? by john Nelson on Feb 23, 2008 at 9:53:06 pm
Thanks Tory,
I'm running a quad 2.5GHz mac, which I should have stated in the post. No other programs/projects seem to be running while the rendering is going on. What else can I check?
Re: More Ram = More Better, right? by Kevin Camp on Feb 23, 2008 at 10:08:27 pm
there are a few things we don't know about your setup...
1. how many cores is you g5?
2. are you using ae cs3?
as tory mentioned, processing speed is the primary factor in render speed. ram can improve performance by decreasing the use of ram disk/disk caching and providing a constant stream of data to the processors.
however, if you have cs3 or a render agent like nucleo you can get more processing cores to render. one of the main requirements in being able to effectively use multiple processors is more ram. since you have 6gb of ram, you should be able to get as many as 4 cores to work, but you need to enable it in the ae multiprocessing preference (note, nucleo is a different procedure). enabling that should give you better performance.
Re: More Ram = More Better, right? by Kevin Camp on Feb 24, 2008 at 1:23:56 am
there are a handful of effects in 6.5 that are multiprocessor aware, but most are not, and neither is the render engine. you might look into nucleo. it will allow 6.5 to render using multiple processors. the word on the street is that it is better at multiprocessing than cs3 and people swear by it, but, honestly, i've never used it.
aharon rabinowitz did a review of nucleo and nucleo pro last year if you want to learn more about how it works. click on his face on the ae forum page, then search the page for 'nucleo' and you'll find it. i believe you can download a free trial of nucleo too.
Re: More Ram = More Better, right? by john Nelson on Feb 24, 2008 at 1:38:51 am
I just got the same advice from the folks over on the apple thread about nucleo so it looks like my answer will be another $50 bucks. Sure hope my numbers come up tonight:}
Re: More Ram = More Better, right? by Bret Williams on Feb 24, 2008 at 7:42:05 am
I'm not sure what your 30sec comp involves, but you might want to step it up to a MacPro and CS3. I know it's not a great analogy, but a year ago I was running a dual G4 and AE 5.5. I did some 30 second projects that were pretty deep in precomps and 3D layers. They were taking 4+ hours each. Some longer.
When I got CS3 and my mac pro, (just a dual dualcore 2 gig with the stock vid card) I rerendered some of those 4 hour projects to see the speed difference. They were more like 5-15 minutes. Actually, I think those tests were with AE 5.5 on the Mac Pro under rosetta! I need to run them again in CS3.
The G5 is a big step from a dual g4. But still, I'm rendering an extremely intense nested, nested, nested, nested project that's :35 seconds right now and the renders are 35 minutes for 35 seconds. Everything is 720p30. I only have 3 gigs of RAM, and I keep FCP open to check completed renders while AE is still rendering in the background. Sometimes I still have PS and Ai open, plus my mail, plus Safari of course. It never even makes a difference in the render time. I also monitor the renders out the firewire port to an SD NTSC monitor. AE has to do another calculation to spit it out in DV. All this, and I check the render que and it says it's using 59% of 3 gigs of RAM. And, I haven't setup the multi processor rendering. I've read tests that don't show the intels to be much faster than the same number of same ghz ppcs, but I find it to be just amazing for my work. Go intel.
Just how intense is the 30sec project you're rendering anyway?
Re: More Ram = More Better, right? by john Nelson on Feb 24, 2008 at 9:31:41 pm
Thanks Bret,
I'm afraid I'm going to have to sell a lot of those 30 second spots before another upgrade takes place. Saving my pennies for that Nucleo program I'm reading about. Although, last night I downloaded the trial and it crashed AE. Now AE won't even open without crashing. Go figure. If you have a magic bullet in your arsenal I'd take it; right between the eyes...
Re: More Ram = More Better, right? by Bret Williams on Feb 25, 2008 at 7:22:59 am
Considering a new box is about $2500 I'd quit buying the RAM since it isn't helping and costs about as much as a new box. Ditto with apps like Nucleo.
Tell me though, what is this 30sec spot like? Why does it take 3 hours? I can't imaging creating a spot that takes that long to render with the CPUs these days.
Re: More Ram = More Better, right? by john Nelson on Feb 25, 2008 at 2:02:57 pm
Thanks again, Bret,
The spot is an animation piece I put together with lots of things flying around, lights and shadows, motion blurs, bevels and the like. The first one took over 4. Then I got onto all that extra material I didn't need and knocked off an hour. Something tells me, though, I'm still not seeing the horsepower this thing is capable of. Maybe a switch, preference, something. Anyway, I appreciate your comments and assistance.
Re: More Ram = More Better, right? by Dave LaRonde on Feb 25, 2008 at 4:24:05 pm
[john Nelson]"Something tells me, though, I'm still not seeing the horsepower this thing is capable of. Maybe a switch, preference, something."
I bet you are seeing the horsepower. Would you expect a 3D application like Maya or something to zip along? Creating an image in AE sometimes takes a bunch of time, depending on the circumstances. Here's a bad-case scenario:
• A 3D comp
• Three lights: key, fill and backlight
• All layers accept lights and cast shadows
• Motion blur is tuned on
• Layers composed of stills (5000x3000) with multiple animated effects applied
• Video layers (HDV) are time remapped and have CC Force motion blur applied
That's a recipe for looooooong render times right there. Tick off how many apply to your work. Now mind you, those aren't the ONLY things that make for long renders. They just happen to be the worst offenders.
Re: More Ram = More Better, right? by John Nelson on Feb 25, 2008 at 6:38:34 pm
Hi Dave,
Thanks for the 'encouraging words'...
What? No Partridge in a Pear tree?
Guess next time I create a monster like this, I'll arrange for a long, quiet weekend with the honey at some beach resort, and leave the rendering home alone with the kiddos and hope reddy killowatt hangs around till it's done.
The activity monitor just shows CPU activity, along with the other stuff, not multiple CPU's, right? Uninformed minds want to know...
Re: More Ram = More Better, right? by Kevin Camp on Feb 25, 2008 at 9:10:37 pm
[John Nelson]"The activity monitor just shows CPU activity, along with the other stuff, not multiple CPU's, right?"
it should show each cpu's activity level. without cs3 or nucleo, you should notice that all cpu's rarely ever reach the maximum intensity levels. with cs3 on my 4-core mac pro they will all reach the maximum level about 10-15 seconds into a render, and usually stay there with very little fluctuation. one exception is when i have to 'export' a dv stream for some very picky hardware, then the cpu levels are like multiprocessing is not enabled...
Re: More Ram = More Better, right? by Steve Boultbee on Feb 25, 2008 at 11:08:37 pm
[John Nelson]"The activity monitor just shows CPU activity, along with the other stuff, not multiple CPU's, right? Uninformed minds want to know..."
There are two easy ways in Activity Monitor to see how much CPU power your computer is using.
The first is to sort all the processes by the CPU % column. On your Quad, you'd want After Effects to be as close to 400% as possible. Since there are other processes running, you won't get there, but ideally it'd be over 350% if you're not running any other programs (excluding OS X itself). I have a feeling that AE is only running at 125 - 150% when you render.
The second method is to look at the CPU graph window. As I recall, you get to that through the Window menu. You'll get a vertical bar graph for each CPU. The more the four bars are near the top, the more your CPUs are being utilized. With AE 6.5 and without Nucleo, you will probably see alternating bars spiking to 100%.
With Nucleo installed, you should see separate processes in Activity Monitor (on mine, they show up as 'aerendercore' in Activity Monitor's list), and each of them should use close to 100%. The CPU graph would show all four CPUs at full utilization.
Re: More Ram = More Better, right? by Bret Williams on Feb 26, 2008 at 7:21:50 am
[Dave LaRonde]"• A 3D comp
• Three lights: key, fill and backlight
• All layers accept lights and cast shadows
• Motion blur is tuned on
• Layers composed of stills (5000x3000) with multiple animated effects applied
• Video layers (HDV) are time remapped and have CC Force motion blur applied "
The comp I described earlier that was only taking 33minutes for 35 seconds of 720p 30 pretty much is what you describe, minus the large5000x3000 images. But it's 3D, (with 3D seq nested within 3D sequences to create 3D models of cubes and house blue prints with walls coming out of the blueprint. Pretty much all the layers cast shadows and accept lights and shadows. Extreme motion blur on everyhing! But no CC Force motion blur. But I do have lots of stills with people cut out and sorta animated. Lots of cameras. Nothing is prerendered.
