Ram preview is short?

Why is Ram preview so short? i get maybe 2 min of preview time at 1/2 res 1092x1080 on a new Mac Pro with 32GB of Ram! It seems if AE is out of RAM it could render to the SSd or any hard drive and playback 30 min of footage but no i only get 2 min, anyone know if this camn be fixed? I have disk Cache enabled and set to 72GB, I thought this was suppose to fix this?
Thanks, Mark

Hi Rick,
This has been an issue since I cam remember, CS4 possibly earlier, i am using the latest CC now and on a new Mac Pro i don't see why this is still a limitation.
Mentioned above I have disk Cache enabled and set to 72GB, Caching on the 1TB internal Mac Pro SSD. If I render out the clip full res it only uses 6GB of space and I have the comp set to 1/2 res. It is a simple panning background made up of about 20 PS layers, very simple, I don't know why that would make a difference, isn't Ram preview just rendering the frames out to ram? If there is movement it renders a new frame right? and there is movement in every frame. CPU is not my issue, it is the length of the timeline Ram preview will render (not how long it takes). Why can it Ram preview 30 min of footage if needed to my SSD and play it back? It seems like it would be simple!
Thanks, Mark

Similar Messages

Shrinking ram previews, even with All Purged!

Hi there,
I had the same problem with AE ram previews on my G4 Powerbook that I am now having on the MacBook Pro which replaced it.
What happens is the ram previews get shorter and shorter. I have two gigs of memory, not a ton, but enough for at least a minute and a half of ram preview time at half resolution (D1 project). I just opened a project, loaded up a ram preview and it loads well over a minute and a half. Then what happens is I keep working and creating new portions to ram preview and little by little the ram preview time gets smaller and smaller. Before long, I have a 20 second region selected for ram preview and it only loads 2 seconds.
If I Purge All I will then get about 30 seconds of preview time, but soon after, it gets down to a second, and sometimes just a few frames. I have to quit the program and start it up again to get the full preview time... :(!
Because this exact same problem happened with my last Apple laptop, I assume this is a problem not with the computer, or the particular memory, but with either AfterEffects, or some of the other software I have on my computer, which is Logic Studio, Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop CS3 and a bunch of smaller apps. But I really can't believe it's any of the other apps... Anyway, that's why I have written. To see if anyone else has encountered this problem, or heard about it.
Thanks so much!
Again, I have a MacBook Pro
2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 DRAM
21 GB available disc space on the actual computer
Mac OS 10.4.10
AE CS3 8.0.2.27

Thanks again! I really really appreciate your advice.
The format I have been using was quicktime DVC50 NTSC exported directly from FCP. And, again, this behavior is identical to the way AE behaved on other projects and an earlier version of the OS like 5 months ago... It's really since I upgraded to the latest version of AE. But I have been considering upgrading to 10.5 for a while now. Maybe now it the time... It's worth a try.
I have purged the media cache. Again, it will free up some portion, but not all, and afterwards this "sticky filling" starts to happen much faster.
Of course, after posting the blog AE behaved perfectly! Just to make things more strange! Hopefully somebody will have heard of this problem and know how to solve, or at least can offer more clues.
Thanks again for your great help, Mylenium.

CS6 RAM preview short and "needs 2 or more frames" errors

Hello everyone,
I've been researching this one for over a week now and still haven't found a solution. The short story it is that my RAM preview is limited to only a few seconds regardless of work area, but I've got over 4Gb of RAM available and open for use. CPU is barely being used as well. I'm also intermittently getting the "After Effects Error: RAM Preview requires 2 or more frames to playback," which confuses me as I have 4Gb or ram available. RAM is still close to 4Gb during and after preview. This has been a repeated problem, not matter how many times the memory is purged, the RAM is free'd up with the Memory Clear App (as recommended in previous threads), or the computer is restarted. Memory and Cache have been optimized for best performance as well. Also, final renders are fine and have no problems. It's only with RAM preview and previewing the project that I'm having trouble. It seems to me that the project is being bottlenecked somewhere but not sure where or how. To open, here's the system I'm running it on. It may not be a brute but it should be enough to handle the work.
System:
Program: Adobe After Effects CS6 (11.0.4.2
System: Mid 2010 iMAC, 27-inch
Processor: 2.8 GHz Intel Core i5
RAM:   8GB 1333 MHz DDR3 (two 4gb cards)
Graphics: ATI Radion HD 5750 1024 MB
Software: OS X 10.9.4
Hard Drive: Western Digital WD Green 2TB Sata drive
                    -6.0 Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive
Project Specifics: (Has happened across other similar projects)
Project: Educational video with graphics, simple animations, and link to Premiere Pro timeline.
               -33 layers (most are highlight boxes and animated arrows)
                         -13 small PNG images (Arrows and simple graphics with 1 3D layer)
                         -7 Short Compositions
                         -7 Text Layers
                         -5 shape layers
                         -1 Premiere Pro Timeline
Composition Settings: 1280 x 720 at 23.976fps
Project Location: Company Server
Problems
-Ram preview only renders a few seconds, regardless of Work Area or "From Current Time" enabled.
-Fairly frequent, "After Effects Error: RAM preview requires two or more frames to playback."
-Scrolling through project is very pixelated.
When Problems Occurs: When trying to perform a RAM preview.
Attempted Solutions:
- Use of Memory Clean App to open up more RAM. (Makes little to no difference when problem is at peak.)
- Shut down and restart computer (Does work for a short time but problem reappears within an hour)
- Closing all apps and running just After Effects. (Little to no difference)
- Turning off motion blur, turning on 3D draft and using Proxies to simplify project. (Little to no difference)
- Purge: All Memory. (No difference)
- Stopping any unnecessary processes in Activity Monitor. (No difference)
Additional Information:
-Projects seem to take a little longer than normal to open. (1-2 min max.)
Thanks in advance for any support on this issue. It's been quite a stressful timesink.

Unfortunately the problem has come back again after an hour of use this morning. To show how much RAM I have available at the time the issue appears, I've included the Memory Clean window showing 4.44GB of ram available at the time of incident. It first happened a few minutes ago with roughly 1GB available, so I and purged all memory in After Effects and cleaned the RAM with the Memory Clear app, but still no such luck. I've been working with the same actions and material all morning so nothing new was introduced to the project when the error occurred. The work I was performing at the time was animating highlight boxes over a screen capture, but again it seems to happen regardless of what I'm working on. I'm going to restart the computer and see how long it makes it before needing another reset. Any other ideas as to what it could be? Also, if there's any more information that might be helpful to solving the issue please let me know and I'll be happy to share. Thank you again for the support!
Szalam, thank you for the link. I had been to the page previously but am going back to watch them again to see if I missed something. If it is a bottleneck, I'm not sure where it could be as of yet.
And just to make sure I'm not making any other simple mistakes VVV

Using RAM preview on a shorter period (after effects)

Hey there Ae users!
I'm trying to make a lyrical video with after effects, but to hear to vocals of my song i have to listen to it so i can place the words on the right time.
But now i'm using RAM preview to listen to it, but it works really inefficiently... Can anyone tell me a better solution to have the music right when i play the 'play button',
instead of having to listen the whole song before continuing on a guess?
Hopefully you guys can help me!
~Cas

The best way to do what you are trying to do is to open up Premiere Pro and do speech recognition on the audio track then import the audio into After Effects and you'll have labeled markers for every word exactly in the right place. If you create a transcript of the words then your speech recognition will be perfect. I work this way all the time.
Improving Speech Analysis with a Text File | Peachpit TV for Video | Adobe TV
The alternative to that is to press the . key to run an audio preview and then use the * key on the numeric keypad to set markers on the audio track.

After Effects Ram Preview Drops Frames , Using Strangely Too Much Ram

System Specs :
     CPU : Core i7 4770k
     Memory : 16 GB DDRIII
     Graphic Card : GTX 770 4GB RAM
     Storage : 256 GB SSD + 2 TB HDD
     OS : Windows 7 SP1
     Using After Effects CC 12.2.1.5
NOTE : NOT ANY ADDITIONAL HARDWARE IS ATTACHED TO MY PC . NO SOUND RELATED EQUIPMENT NOR CAPTURE CARD NOR ANY THING ELSE
Hi there
As you Already Don't know I'm an After effects Specialist Using it for quite long time . There is an Ancient Problem with CS6 CC versions . I have a short Small size 1080p Video , about 8 MB , I drag it into project panel and then put it into timeline hence it creates a sequence . There are no Effects and nothing added to timeline , just a small simple video . The Strange Problem is when I click "0" for ram preview , The video starts playing and the green bar above timeline starts to fill . When Ram preview Finishes and plays the video from beginning I See there are several frames Between which are not being loaded to Ram ! The video plays RGB color bar instead of main video and when I check the Green bar above Timeline I see that those frames are being dropped and there is no Green bar above them !
I have had this problem several times before but this time it is too important and the problem should be solved . What is obvious is that some frames are not being rendered or are being deleted after render !
Another Strange problem is that when I open Task manager , It shows AE uses around 10 GB ! of RAM when I press "0" for Ram previewing this video !
So there is a Logical explanation here , Somehow when I do ram preview this video it uses extra ordinary too much ram so AE is unable to load the full video (8 MB) into Ram and hence deletes some of frames .
most of my videos have not this problem and use acceptable amount of ram .I've had this issue with some of my videos till now .
Listen carefully : "This has nothing to do with AE preferences or low memory or plugins . because there is nothing wrong with any individual components of may hardware or software . I have far more than enough RAM for a 8MB video . My Memory has no hardware or software problem . I tested them and if there was any problem with memory or other hardware that should have affected other applications . I have the most recent AE version . I have the most Recent windows updates and drivers . I have a Clean virus free system , and as a computer engineer this strange AE problem is rarely caused by viruses , trust me . I have not any hardware instead of ones a normal PC has . I have not any problem with my whole entire system configuration because I have benchmarked my PC with several up to date softwares . I have tested my PC with almost any STRESS TESTING solutions available for really long period of time , 3 days by IDA64 . Not any driver conflict , dll missing , registry problem have been discovered , as I know perfectly how to solve them ."
I asked some of my friend whom are expert in AE . I handed them my videos and Watched ALL OF THEM HAD THE SAME ISSUE ! So the problem isn't related to my Local PC . What i believe is that there is some malfunctioning or miss coded part in AE source code that decides to reserve such a huge strange amount of ram for such a tiny 8MB video . The point is that the AE works fine , no crash or any problem report . So the AE it Self decides to allocate such huge amount of ram and thinks it is correct ! So I think this is a work around that AE developers in adobe are using to bypass a problem or conflict ! by Using more amount of RAM . I think that there might be some miss understanding between the AE and my installed codec . I installed MEGA CODEC PACK on my PC to enable some new codec supports , and so are some of Windows default de/encoders changed to new ones . I think there shouldn't be any problem But there is something wrong between AE and de/encoder modules !
Please any one with any suggestion , I really appreciate your advices .

###UPDATED###
Well thank you guys for your patience ...
as you considered I forgot to mention the codec itself and other stuff ...
The video is in 1080p , 35 sec long , it is a green screen shot , this video is directly downloaded from YouTube and plays perfectly on all tested PCs . here are detailed info :
Format                                   : MPEG-4
Format profile                          : Base Media
File size                                 : 8.55 MiB
Duration                                 : 34s 993ms
Overall bit rate mode                : Variable
Overall bit rate                         : 2 050 Kbps
VideoFormat                            : AVC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile                           : [email protected]
Codec ID                                 : avc1
Codec ID/Info                            : Advanced Video Coding
Bit rate                                    : 1 927 Kbps
Width                                      : 1 920 pixels
Height                                     : 1 080 pixels
Frame rate mode                      : Constant
Frame rate                               : 30.000 fps
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                 : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                  : 8 bits
Scan type                                 : Progressive
NOTICE : This video is just for testing the lighting and etc , and so the Sampling and other specs are not considered for broadcast .
I think you hit the point ! Thats K-lite codec pack installed on every machine which the video is tested on ! The point is whats wrong with it ?! I have had never ever any problem with this codec pack !!!
The deadly question : So what are the alternative ways to work with codecs that AE doesn't support ?! because installing codec looks simple and sufficient !

After Effects CS4 freezing with RAM preview audio?

Firstly, I'm on a mac. This problem just started a few hours ago after I made some system updates. When I hit preview in a comp with audio it runs through the frames, then locks up when it would normally start playing. I just get that dang spinning beach ball of doom. If I turn off the audio on the layer, it previews fine. I believe the only think I had updated when this problem began was upgrading to quicktime 7.6.2. Would this effect the RAM preview? Since the problem, I've updated AE to 9.0.2 and OS 10.5.7 with no change.
Anyone come across something similar?
Thanks

Mmh, well, seems ominous, but quite obviously QT is somehow involved. do you use any dedicated video hardware such as AJA or BMD cards? If so, the QT update may have introduced an incompatibilty with their drivers... Even if not using any such equipemnt, definitely check your QT system control panel. Also use OnyX to flush your QT components cache. They may just need to re-initilaized to function properly. Short of that I'm not aware of such issues, but anything is possible. If the issue persists, using Pacifist and downgrading your QT may be the only option. What Mac are you on exactly?
Mylenium

RAM previewing issue

Hi,
I'm working in After Effects CS4, and I'm having a problem when I try to RAM preview short sections of an animation project. The RAM preview keeps stopping before it reaches the end of the work area, and beginning again. I'm pretty new to the program, but I've also noticed the little green bars that, I believe, tell you if the section has rendered/processed always have little gaps in them. That may be related. I don't know.
Does anyone know what may be causing this RAM previewing issue?
On a side note, I'm using After Effects on a Macbook (not a Macbook Pro), and I'm wondering whether this problem may be due to the Macbook not being sufficient for After Effects and CS4 in general. (I had originally intended to install the program on my 2004-era G5 tower, but it wouldn't install After Effects CS4 because apparently the program won't work with PowerPC processors, only Intel ones. At least that's what I was told.) Anyway, I've wondered whether the RAM previewing issue may be due to the Macbook not being enough computer for After Effects/CS4. My Macbook has a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 and 106 GB of available space.
Any insights on the RAM previewing issue and whether my Macbook isn't a suitable computer for these programs would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks a lot,
Neil

From the theoretical specs there is nothing that speaks against your notebook. Apparently the biggest hurdle for some users is to get it to run in the first place, but now that it runs, it's safe to say that you will be able to use it properly. Of course, to let truth have its way, you will become slightly peeved at a point and get that yearning for a new machine, when you use more functions and your projects become more complex. Especially the only 2GB RAM will then often become a show stopper and you will really hate Adobe when one of those dreaded "Could not creat X x Y buffer" or similar out of memory warnings pop up. Still, no need to rush. Take your time and see, if AE is even everything you thought it would be and then make clear, structured plans for getting a new computer. You wouldn't wanna spend another 2000 bucks on a spiffy machine just to run AE once a month.
Mylenium

Ram Preview won't start when Render multiple frames simultaneously enabled

Hello everyone,
I have an issue with rendering AE CC , with my new PC computer in Windows 8.1 pro 64 bit
As the title says , my issue is Ram Preview won't start when Render multiple frames simultaneously enabled. Actually it starts after 8 -30 seconds depending of project complexity and the rendering is slower and skipping frames !
12 cores with 2 GB ram each.
When I disable the option of multiple frames simultaneously render starts ok.
but it's really very sad that I can't use this beast of CPU in full potential. its an new intel i7 5930K , 32 Ram DDR4 2.4 Ghz
Any advice and options would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Vonzar.
Setup:
Windows 8.1 Pro 64 bit
CPU : Intel Core i7 5930K 3.5 GHz Six Core Socket 2011-3 140W Box
GPU : nVidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB DDR5 PCI-E
RAM : 32GB DDR4 Non ECC CL16 2400MHz Crucial Ballistix Sport
Mother board : Asrock x99 extreme 6

If you have any render or preview problems just turn off MP because, first, it only works with certain specific effects and codecs, and 2, it causes more problems that it solves most of the time. I only turn on MP rendering when I know for sure that it will speed up my workflow.
You should have a multiple of 4 GB assigned to AE and Other apps and an even number of cores. If you are using MP rendering make sure that the number of actual cores used makes sense and that there are an even number of cores assigned to other applications. Most important of all, don't spend hours trying to tweak MP rendering to save a few seconds in a render. Follow these general guidelines and then run a short test to see if it works. If you project involves any temporal effects at all turn it off.
Here is an example of the MP settings for a 4 year old Mac Mini that actually work for some projects, but most of the time it is turned off.
I should say that I can allocate 3 GB of ram per background CPU and still see 2 as the actual CPU's that will be used but this little Mac Mini works better with 2 selected. Setting the RAM allocation to 4 GB drops Actual CPU's to 0
BTW, I use the mac mini to record most of my tutorials because I figure that if I do a tutorial that will run OK on a Mac Mini, then anyone with an adequate system should be able to follow along without any problems.

(MP) RAM Previews haven't worked reliably since February

I was really hoping the CC 2014 update would address this issue I've been experiencing since February, but the issue remains and if anything is worse than ever. Long story short, sometimes RAM previews work as expected (as in I press the RAM preview button and After Effects actually generates a RAM preview) and other times pressing the RAM preview button results in delays ranging from several seconds to several minutes or simply never doing anything at all. Sometimes, it's the horrendous "Initializing Background Processes this may take some time..." message, and other times it's "Rendering frame (MP) 2 of XXX requested" followed by...nothing ever happening. Try to imagine how frustrating this can be when on a deadline or with clients in the room.
I'd read that the size of your project can be a major factor in such delays. Well, I just started a brand new project that contains exactly one asset (a 1920x1080 22-second H264 video file), added a couple filters and clicked RAM Preview, only to be met with the "Rendering frame (MP) 2 of XXX requested" message and no frame ever rendered. Activity monitor showed 8 red "aeselflink (Not Responding) processes that didn't go away when I quit After Effects. I quit After Effects, logged out and back in, relaunched the project and RAM preview worked as expected. As I said, completely unreliable and unpredictable.
I need RAM Previews to work all of the time, not some of the time, and I need them to work with multi-processing enabled. I realize that disabling multi-processing for RAM previews resolves the up-front delays - but using only one of my eight CPUs is NOT a fix (considering each RAM preview would therefore take 8 times longer). Nor is rebooting and relaunching After Effects a dozen times per day a real solution, right?
My system is a 2013 New Mac Pro, 3Ghz 8-Core Intel Xeon E5, 32GB RAM, Dual D300 GPUs running Mac OS X 10.9.3 and purchased in January; I don't recall experiencing the issue prior to the February 13th AE update). The issue is present with both Adobe After Effects CC 12.2 and Adobe After Effects CC 2014 13.0. My Memory and Multi-Processing Preferences are in the attached image. I truly appreciate any help that can be offered. Thank you!

Rick, please read my third paragraph. While yes - disabling multi-processing helps, effectively turning my computer into a one-processor machine instead of an 8-processor machine is not a solution.
And I experience these long delays even with NO filters or 3rd party effects whatsoever. I just rendered an animation that was nothing more than a couple sliding illustrator layers with a 3D camera move and the render took 3 full minutes to get beyond "initializing background processes, this may take some time...". This just after a fresh launch of Adobe After Effects.

Plenty of RAM, but RAM preview clears itself?...

Hello:
I've got a 20 second motion project that I'm selecting a 5 second portion of (using the timeline in and out markers). I clear ram preview (just to be safe), then do a RAM preview.
I watch my memory fill up partially in activity monitory. It only uses about 1.5 G out of a total of 4G RAM.
Then, I play the project... it chokes. I've got a replicator and a mask or 2, with some graphics. The project is HD, but I've got an X1900 card.
I also notice that as I scrub through the short burst I'm trying to preview the RAM preview (Green on the timeline) indicator disappears, reappears, get's chopped up, comes back.
Is this normal behavior? Seems like I should be cooking with oil at this point....
Thanks for any input!

Fun fact:
(Motion notes below) Final Cut Pro can only use a maximum of about 2.5GB of the 4GB maximum RAM it can allocate from the system.
Final Cut Pro is a 32 bit application, which means it can address up to 4GB of RAM. Of that 4GB, Final Cut Pro uses about 1.5GB for libraries, drivers, and so on.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93844
Doesn't matter how much RAM you've got, that's the limit.
Motion is going to encounter similar issues, but I don't have the numbers. You won't be able to use a large chunk of the 4GB it can allocate. (Also, if you've only got 4GB RAM total, a chunk of that will be allocated to the actual operating system)
Message was edited by: mattlewis

No audio in Ram Preview

Hi. I'll try and be a short and detailed as I can. After Effects CS5.5. Import an audio track or video containing audio and I cannot hear audio during playback after Ram Preview is created. I can hold the control key and scrub audio. Audio renders when I render the project. I can do an Audio Preview only, but I cannot seem to figure out how to see the graphics (which are animated to the audio itself) and hear the audio play back at the same time. This creates a unique problem when creating graphics which are timed to the audio. Do I really need to render the entire project every time I want to preview my work?
Thanks...

Well let me try to give you the big picture (pun intended)
What you can't see here: I use a Bose 2.1 speaker system (not that that has any impact).
Audio renders fine, scrubs fine, I can do an audio preview fine but NEVER both an audio and video preview.

Ram preview question

hello forumers.
ive made a short 1min little intro but the ram preview will not go all the way so the intro will not play so i can see it uptil 1:00min it only goes half
way and stops.,what can i do?
thanks.

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/424030

Unable to create image buffer after RAM preview

Running into an odd and frustrating error. Built a comp using the new Ray-traced 3D renderer and now I'm regretting being an early adopter big time with all the problems I've been encountering with it. The latest comes whenever I do a longer RAM preview in an attempt to watch the whole duration of my comp. It will get to about 170 frames or so, at which point I've interrupted by pressing spacebar because I don't need to see all the way to the end of my work area (around 220 frames). It'll play the RAM preview back fine, and even loop it, but as soon as I stop playback, I get this error message: "After Effects warning: Unable to create image buffer." There's only one button: "okay" and as soon as I click it the same error pops up again and it will never go away, forcing me to close AE from the task manager. I've taken to saving before every RAM preview like I used to do with Flash before previewing my buggy swfs for fear I'll lose all my work after previewing. Any ideas about what might be causing this?
Some more details about my comp:
1920x1080 @ 29.97
Ray-traced 3D
About 70 3D layers (I'm guessing this is my downfall - new renderer not designed for this many layers?)
Running Windows 7 Professional
i7 2600K
32GB RAM
2x GTX 570 video cards running latest driver (301.42, CUDA 4.2.1)
508GB free on my 2TB internal drive where the project and cache lives
From my GPU info window in case it's useful:
Fast Draft:
Available
Texture Memory:
600.00 MB
Ray-tracing:
GPU
OpenGL
Vendor:
NVIDIA Corporation
Device:
GeForce GTX 570/PCIe/SSE2
Version:
3.0.0
Total Memory:
1.20 GB
Shader Model:
4.0 or later
CUDA
Driver Version:
4.2
Devices:
2 (GeForce GTX 570, GeForce GTX 570)
Current Usable Memory:
1.04 GB (at application launch)
Maximum Usable Memory:
1.25 GB

Yeah, some buffer is very likely not flushing when you interrupt the preview and then there is no more memory on the graphics hardware. Consider setting the work area and your preview options to use only the work area. if it finishes the preview "correctly", it may not suffer the issue. Beyond that - raytracing doesn't/ shouldn't care about the number of items. The math is such, that it makes no difference whether you render a million polygons or just one. Of course there are still limitations due to the GPU dependency, but I doubt you ever truly exhaust the cards' geometry buffers. Compared to pixel data that is a small amount...
Mylenium

AE CS4 - why such poor RAM preview on my FAST machine?

Hi all, I just installed After Effects CS4 - I have a smokin fast mchine: quadcore Zeon 3.20 GHz, hyperthreading turned on, nvidia quadrofx 3800 with current driver, 12 GB DDR3 RAM, windows 7 64bit ... can you PLEASE help me troubleshoot a problem: even on the simplest compositions, a moving picture or a moving piece of type, the RAM preview stutters along, the current time indicator hops along at a choppy pace, images in the frame dont look like they're moving smoothly, and all i get is about 6 seconds of RAM preview ... seems to me that I used to get better performance on a MUCH MUCH slower machine under windows XP ... i have looked around the forums and seem the advice on multiprocessor options and the like, but nothing I do seems to help ... do any of you have any advice for me to improve my performance??? if you have any questions about my setup or preferences, let me know, I will be on this until I get what I expect out of my (otherwise incredibly fast) machine

Hi Todd, thanks again for your reply ... FYI, I bought the FX3800 for Avid editing, for which it is the qualified video card, and supports distributed processing in the Avid along with my DX HD hardware BOB - I had hoped it would work well with After Effects, too, but I do understand the Adobe is very transparent about the fact that, as long as your card has OpenGL support, probably best to sink your $$$ into more RAM or faster CPU .. but to stay on topic, I am just very stunned that I am not getting better playback with my system ... I have the most recent Nvidia drivers ... I have 2 NEC 2490WUXi2 each connected through DVI-D to my video card, each runnign at its native 1920x1200 res, 59 hertz ... the programs I have installed are Adobe CS4 Production Premium, Win7 64bit, MS Office 2007 Enterprise, latest version of Quick Time, Media Player version 11, and NERO 9 ... you dont think that one of these video player apps (like media player or QT) are messing with my screen performance do you? what about Nero 9, have you heard any compatibility or display problems associated with this app? would unistalling any of these programs be a troubleshooting technique that you'd attempt?
Finally, when you say "an issue with a bottleneck of drawing to the screen" what do you mean exactly? 'cause this kinds sounds like a goood description of what I am seeing ... what might be the cause of such a bottleneck, I am willing to try anything ...
Thanks, sir, for your reply!
Derek Reid
Trader Multimedia Inc.
www.tradermm.com
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:46:43 -0600
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: AE CS4 - why such poor RAM preview on my FAST machine?
Just one thing to cut down a frequent misconception:
Your nice graphics card doesn't do much for After Effects performance.In fact, trying to use OpenGL for rendering (including rendering of previews) can cause problems.
I recommend turning OpenGL rendering off for all but interactions. I.e., choose the http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WSAF696587-2D81-42e2-B248-4C5C2B7D3614a.html and turn off http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103a4f2dff7-79e8a.htm l. OpenGL is not compatible with Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing.
I'm not saying that OpenGL is your problem. Rather, because you mentioned your nice graphics card, I just had to stress that you need to forget about that with regard to After Effects. It's not really relevant.
It may be that the jerkiness is an issue with a bottleneck of drawing to the screen. (I don't know, but it's possible.)
Your hard disk being too slow wouldn't be an issue with RAM previews, since the frames are all cached in RAM.
>

Issues with performance and RAM previews

Just did a major system upgrade from an iMac to a Mac Pro, and now I'm having an issue with performance...specifically with RAM previews.
When I try to do a RAM preview with audio, it grinds my entire OS to a hault (can't switch apps, or click on much of anything). It eventually clears up enough for me to stop the RAM preview.
So, I'm wondering if maybe my Memory & Multiprocessing settings might be off.
Here are my system specs:
Mac Pro
2 x 2.4GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon (12 cores)
64GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 5870
AE CS6 (11.0.2.11)
AE is installed on an SSD drive and the scratch disk is an internal HDD.
Here are my AE Memory Settings:
Here's my GPU Info:
Let me know if any other info is needed...

You are reserving far too little RAM for other software.
See this: "Performance tip: Don't starve your software of RAM."
(Also, I recommend going through all of these materials: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/543440 )
Regarding the SSD: Putting your application files on it means that applications load/boot faster. This is fine, but that benefit is just when you first start the application. If you put your cache files on it, then you get the benefit every time that something is read from or written to the cache---i.e., many times per second, for the entire time that you're working. Put your cache files on your SSD. BTW, there's no reason to not put your application files and caches on the same SSD. The reason that you split things across multiple disks is to prevent simultaneous reads and writes to and from a slow disk; the program loading from disk happens at a different time than reading and writing cache files, so there is no potential for conflict and slowdown.

Ram preview is short?

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