AE CS5 memory settings & feedback

The After Effects team posted new memory settings recommendations and is requesting feedback -- which may help make for "smarter, more realistic settings for the next version of After Effects." Here's an excerpt from Todd Kopriva's post Please try recommended memory settings for After Effects CS5 and give feedback.:

"We’re now recommending much higher settings for the RAM To Leave For Other Applications and Minimum Allocation Per CPU preferences. If you start with these numbers both quite high, you will avoid the problems of swapping memory to the hard disk (which is a real performance killer) and starving the background rendering processes such that they shut down and don’t do anything."

Update: There's discussion of this on the Adobe Forums, more in an Adobe FAQ, and some on the AE-List where Carey Dissmore began a thread on a benchmark article on Ars Technica,

"Bumpy road to multi-core: Ars reviews the 12-core 2010 Mac Pro, Main article: http://bit.ly/blLbiS

Of particular note is page 4, http://bit.ly/9fZkcT where FCP and AE don't show very strongly on multithread utilization. Looking forward to some future date when these apps are super-optimized. I know development takes time, lots of time, and it's not easy to just multi-thread any old operation. But still…

BTW Premiere Pro is pretty wicked-fast-impressive these days though. Shows what the hardware can do with new code."

Optimal memory settings in After Effects + faster

There's a new FAQ from Adobe on optimum memory settings for best performance in After Effects CS4 and CS5. It's really a set of links that includes the Help pages on tips for performance improvement and RAM usage in After Effects.

Those pages are detailed and thorough, so it might be good to start with a recent AETtuts quick tip by Won Novalis, Understanding Memory and Multiprocessing, which was 'blessed' by a link from Todd Kopriva.

Update: see also Faster by Michael Coleman.

AE FAQS: memory usage, gamma shifts + more

Today Todd Kopriva added some useful posts on FAQs for After Effects and ProRes 4444 colors and gamma shift when working with After Effects and Final Cut Pro [Todd later added more on ProRes on the AE-List].

Many of us will find these reminders useful, like FAQ: Why doesn't After Effects see and use all of my RAM? In another example, here's a portion from RAM and disk caches that explains counterintuitive memory use of new systems with 8 GB and more of RAM:

"In the Memory & Multiprocessing preferences, After Effects reports the size of the RAM cache---the amount of RAM that can be filled with frames for RAM preview. With Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously turned off, this value is reported as Total After Effects Memory Usage. With Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously turned on, this value is reported as Foreground Memory Usage.

This value will not be the full amount of RAM allocated to the foreground application. Rather, it is just the part that can be filled with frames for RAM preview.

For example, on a Mac, this value might be 1.79GB on my Mac. 4GB is the theoretical limit for an After Effects process (because it's 32-bit). The OS takes a bite, getting you down to ~3GB. The RAM cache is only allowed to use 60% of that, which gets you down to 1.79GB.

The limitation of the RAM cache to 60% of the memory allocated to the foreground process is to avoid fragmentation problems and therefore out-of-memory errors.

The terminology can be confusing in part because in After Effects CS3 we had a Maximum Memory Usage item and a Maximum RAM Cache Size item, and in After Effects CS4 the thing called Foreground Memory Usage maps more closely to the latter, not the former."

Update: it's December and Todd is back with a reminder on RAM, Performance tip: Don't starve your software of RAM.

AE7 out of memory problems

on the AE-list, Michael Natkin's advice on AE7 out of memory problems:

'You can generally help these problems by going to Preferences > Memory and Cache and *lowering* the value of Maximum RAM Cache Size. You are probably running into a situation where memory is fragmented, just like can happen to your hard drive. Try knocking it down 5-10% at a time til the problem goes away. (And yes, we are aware this is not really good :).'
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