So basically I just upgraded my Mac Book Pro to 4GB of RAM specifically to help with AE, and in my operating system (think its the latest leopard 10.5.4) it says it has 4GB RAM installed, however when I load AE it says its using 4% of 3GB and in the preferences it says 3GB, what do I need to do to get AE recognising all 4GB?
Also should I enable multi processing? its a duo core2 2.5ghz....I just want to get AE running as well as possible!
Re: Why does After Effects only recognise 3GB of RAM? by Kevin Camp on Jul 9, 2008 at 2:19:30 pm
after effects is a 32-bit application, so the most ram a 32-bit application can address is 3gb. the mac os is 64-bit and can address much more (something like 16 billion gb), so it can use all of your ram to assign to various applications whether they are 32-bit or 64-bit.
in cs3, you can use the the multiprocessing option to allow ae to launch a render engine for each available processing core. since each render engine is a separate 32-bit application each can grab up to 3gb of ram. so with a 2-core laptop and multiprocessing enabled you will be able to use your 4gb of ram (note that the ae application at start up will still say 3gb, but the render engines that run in the background will be using more).
Re: Why does After Effects only recognise 3GB of RAM? by Kevin Crowley on Sep 6, 2008 at 7:36:54 pm
I have a QuadCore2 with 4GB Ram using Windows XP. When I load AE it only recognizes 2GB of RAM (I know about the 3GB switch - not using it). When I turn my memory & cache to say, 900MB and enable Multiprocessing it says one more processor will be used, which is fine. But the end result with RAM preview is slower than not using multiprocessing. Before it even starts rendering, it takes about 30 seconds (I realize this is the other instance being launched) but even when it is rendering, each frame renders slower than without multiprocessing. Also, from what I understand that initial 30 second delay should only happen the first time you preview, but it happens every time.
Does this sound right? Is it just my ram that is the bottleneck?
