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A good example of how varied computer use is in real life that general recommendations only takes a user "so far". Someone else has a render cow with 16GB of RAM, 44 cores and think they have the perfect configuration.

Haha... I have a Dell M1000e with sixteen M610. It has 192 Xeon L5640 cores total and 1TB of ram. 433,920 GHz :) You would be surprised at how cheap old enterprise gear can be on eBay, the only catch is it's deafeningly loud and draws 6kW at full load. I use it as a training lab since I'm an OpenStack engineer.
 
Sounds normal to me. How do you feel it's odd?

I was thinking that if I set 20 Gigs available to AE, it will use as much as possible to keep the rendering in the RAM, but perhaps everything needed is already there and there is no need to fill it up more. Or maybe it is me not knowing how exactly AE works ;)
 
I was thinking that if I set 20 Gigs available to AE, it will use as much as possible to keep the rendering in the RAM, but perhaps everything needed is already there and there is no need to fill it up more. Or maybe it is me not knowing how exactly AE works ;)

Give almost all u have to AE. Leave 4 gigs for everything else. Don't open any other Adobe apps while rendering. Rule of thumb is keep everything else dormant while rendering. I allocate 60 gig to AE and 4 for all else on all my Macs. On my single CPU machines I allocate 28 to AE aMd 4 for all the others.

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…but perhaps everything needed is already there and there is no need to fill it up more. Or maybe it is me not knowing how exactly AE works ;)

I'm only an occasional AE user nowadays, so I won't go in depth on technical issues. You have the RAM preview that is a function in itself that let's you render to RAM and get realtime playback in situation where you otherwise wouldn't. More RAM here lets you load in more frames (seconds) for longer playback segments.

I've never felt that final output exporting, what I'd normally casually call 'rendering' (and I'm thinking that was what you meant?) is very RAM hungry.
 
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I've never felt that final output exporting, what I'd normally casually call 'rendering' (and I'm thinking that was what you meant?) is very RAM hungry.

Well there's really 3 types of rendering in visual effects on a basic level.
1. Realtime RAM previews on the timeline
2. Outputting from either AE or Media Encoder
3. Heavy rendering work i.e. When working with 3D intensive apps like Maya, C4D etc where factors like occlusion, multi depth passes, surface scattering etc need as much RAM and/or VRAM as possible

I won't go into the technicalities of render farms etc. That's a little different
 
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3. Heavy rendering work i.e. When working with 3D intensive apps like Maya, C4D etc where factors like occlusion, multi depth passes, surface scattering etc need as much RAM and/or VRAM as possible

I do a lot of work in Cinema 4D. I don't remember ever having any RAM issues there (I have 48GB) but I have run out of GPU memory on a 3GB card.
 
OK, so it seems the amount of footage I render (possibly also the amount of corrections and effects etc) is just enough to keep memory usage at about 48-51% during final rendering (20 GB allocated to AE) and I would not benefit from more in my usage scenario. Good to know, will save me some pocket money.

Having said this, I only run AE on a MP 2,1 - so the 667 RAM bandwidth might be the reason my RAM previews from 1080p footage are slow anyway. I also use an AMD card so no CUDA here - and two old quad-core 5355 Xeons.

Never did any rendering (I believe it was once called "raytracing rendering") from 3D software, that's something beyond my understanding.
 
Give almost all u have to AE. Leave 4 gigs for everything else. Don't open any other Adobe apps while rendering. Rule of thumb is keep everything else dormant while rendering. I allocate 60 gig to AE and 4 for all else on all my Macs. On my single CPU machines I allocate 28 to AE aMd 4 for all the others.

cff730e4da1e046fd4c751dbc711b4d2.jpg


1421d485cd17de8d11690012edb36aa3.jpg


02636d00d5b102971352c7a45bd0d648.jpg

Gonna point out you should really allocate more RAM for other apps. Adobe themselves don't recommend going over a 75% allocation.

Really, though, most of Adobe's applications are pretty bad at using large amounts of cores or multiprocessing, After Effects being perhaps the worst culprit—there's no multiprocessing actually available in the application any more, and even before then a single stray plugin could cause the entire thing to fail. Some effects are GPU accelerated, but not most, and I've rarely seen RAM utilization do much for render times (helps with longer previews at best.)
 
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Gonna point out you should really allocate more RAM for other apps. Adobe themselves don't recommend going over a 75% allocation.

Really, though, most of Adobe's applications are pretty bad at using large amounts of cores or multiprocessing, After Effects being perhaps the worst culprit—there's no multiprocessing actually available in the application any more, and even before then a single stray plugin could cause the entire thing to fail. Some effects are GPU accelerated, but not most, and I've rarely seen RAM utilization do much for render times (helps with longer previews at best.)

all true. After Effects itself isn't a heavy multi-core user. but there are ways you can have more going at once. on a 6 core machine it's possible to have 4 or 5 renders running simultaneously,
http://aescripts.com/bg-renderer/

or render in the background while continuing work in the application either with the above or a few options built into AE such as the After Effects Render Engine. and if you are really daring, launch multiple instances of AE so you can have more than one project open at once.

rendering rarely pushes RAM. now a caveat to all this, I'm most familiar with CS6, on Snow Leopard. I'd hope things have gotten better since then.
 
@fuchsdh and thatsallfolks
I agree with both of u totally. However I allocate most of the RAM to AE and leave just a little for everything else for the purpose of RAM previews. The rendering side is done by Media Encoder or for heavier work my render farm as I rarely render out from AE alone. Multiprocessing has been done away with ages ago in AE due to technical issues which caused freeze ups and crashes so u will NOT benefit from having more cores in the latest AE version (CC2017). This is where media Encoder comes in. It can utilize the cores and the Ram efficiently.
But once again the only reason I asssign so much of RAM (above Adobes "recommended" amount) is for RAM previews. For that u can never have too much RAM
 
AndreeOnline knows his stuff,

hwojtek id gess your projects are to small to need more ram, i think mastermamo is working on much more complex work. (and im 99% shore that you will hit the cpu bottle neck way before a ram speed thing).
watch activity monitor and see whats going on, some work loads want fast scratch some want fast CPU some want more ram (you may want all but if your looking for the week link activity monitor will help)
O and some apps need preferences set correctly or you get big slow downs like kartcrg had

i think AE's code base is being re done and thats why it lost the ability to scale so well with more cores/cpu's, i think there transferring AE to use the same code base as PP so round trips work better and it's simpler to update code (+plugins will be universal).
so some gains some loss
 
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