Rendering RAM Requirements
by Charles Taylor
on
Jul 4, 2009 at 12:08:25 am
Just wondering if anyone knows why AE needs so much frickin' RAM to render on multicore machines. Shake can put 4 cpus to the redline while using maybe a gig of RAM. I'm rendering using the Handbrake command line right now, and it's fully utilizing 2 cpus, and using 40MBs of RAM. Maybe Handbrake is a bad example, but Shake is a very similar tool that does very similar things.
Re: Rendering RAM Requirements by Kevin Camp on Jul 6, 2009 at 1:27:23 pm
hi charles,
my guess is that shake is more of a truely multi-threaded app.
when 'render multiple frame simultaneously' is enabled in ae, ae launches a render engine for each available core. essentially running an application for every core. each application gets its own chunk of ram (up to 4gb of ram per core) to process frames indepently.
shake renders with just one application and uses multiple cores to aid in rendering a single frame. also, the nodal render architecture of shake may also reduce ram requirements.
in ae, some effects are multi-threaded (i know keylight is one of them, but there are others). if you disable 'render multiple frames simultaeously' when you render, you'll decrease the ram requirements and any multi-threaded effects should render just as fast.
