Adobe After Effects Issues

Question

Hello I represent the graphic artists of the multimedia department at the USPTA (United States Professional Tennis Association). We do a show that airs on the Tennis Channel called, "On Court with USPTA" and "Sweet Spots".
We have just made the switch over to HD and are working on PCs (Dell Precision T3400 Work stations) I am running Adobe After Effects CS3 and I am running into several issues and problems with the software. I am doing full screen HD graphics, Lower thirds in HD, and even HD video overlayed with Graphics. Some or most have motion, and I even do 3D text in some. I am running into problems of the software crashing, locking up or bogging down reletivly quickly. I can barely RAM preview anything longer then 3 seconds and if it has audio you can just forget the RAM preview. I was wondering if those of us who do graphics on PCs if their is a way to speed up the software, or an update or even something in the prefences that could speed up it up and stop all the crash's I am getting.

Answer 1

>and I have tried the multiprocessing and nothing changed.
MP won't do anything on such a system. Simply not enough RAM. Let truth be told, the only real environment that is suitable for MP as AE employs it, are 64bit operating systems (XP64, Vista 64).
As for your other issues - RAM previews can be extended by lowering the comp resolution to Half or Quarter. It's in the nature of the beast - only the frames that fit into RAM can be previewed and the larger the frame, the less of them fit. There is no way to circumvent that. Your only alternative is to enable the disk cache and have AE store rendered frames on your harddrive. this may allow you to use spacebar playback for some segments rather than having to build RAM previews again and again, but it hinges somewhat on the project structure and how working on other segments of the graphics may invalidate cached frames and layers.
Likewise, audio will consume additional memory and further reduce the available duration. It should however not completely screw this functionality, so I can only assume you have a config problem. Therefore check your system's audio settings and the prefs in AE. Ideally, the sample rates and things should match the audio format used in your project and all fancies such as Virtual Surround or acoustic effects be turned off to prevent delay. It also helps to work with uncompressed audio - even though AE has gotten better at handling MP3 et al, it still prefers PCM audio.
Lastly, some similar things do apply to certain compressed video formats - if they use MPEG and its derivatives, AE may need to conform it prior to use and this may cause further hiccups. Using different capture methods and CoDecs may help to prevent that.
Mylenium