OT - could ram and e-sata make THAT much of a difference.

ok, so i got my shiny new octocore macpro. but i have to be honest. it doesnt feel remarkably speedier than my od G5 quad.

granted - it only has the factory 2gigs of ram where my quad had 4.5gigs AND it doesnt yet have an e-sata card in it so im connected via fw800

- but could those two things have such a DRAMATIC effect on system performance?

Some time ago, like ten years back or more, we reached the point where computers spend most of their time waiting on us, rather than vice-versa. My Mac Pro at work doesn't "feel" any faster than my Macbook at home, when I'm just doing day-to-day stuff like moving files around or reading email or, yeah, even editing.

But wait until you try to render something, or encode something. Holy cow, this system is fast. Encoding a half-hour uncompressed SD show to low-bit-rate two-pass H.264 in ten minutes? That's amazing.

Yes, you need more RAM. Badly. My personal rule of thumb is two gigabytes of RAM per processor, but really you can go up to three or four before you get ridiculous.

Some jobs, like the MayaBatch renderer, parallelize by running a single process with multiple threads. When I do a big mental ray render, it hammers every processor in my system all the way to the limit. But because Maya is a 32-bit application on the Mac, it can't address more than four gigabytes of RAM total. So relatively little of my RAM gets used when I'm rendering.

But After Effects and Compressor operate differently. They run one process per processor, and each process can address four (or maybe it's three; I forget) gigabytes of RAM individually. When I'm doing a big After Effects render, I can only run on six of my eight processors, because if I try to run all eight, it'll use up all the RAM in my system and things will slow down as the computer swaps to disk. If I used After Effects more than I do, I'd definitely spring for the 24- or 32-gigabyte upgrade.

First thing i did with the new mac pro was fill it with lots of RAM... ok so 11Gig was getting a little carried away but i did a test once and took it back to stock ram during a spring clean of its innards... and well frankly if your going to spend money there is nothing better than putting good fast ram in your mac.

C'mon...how long you been in this business wayne? You should know the fastest / best / cheapest way to DRAMATICALLY INCREASE PERFORMANCE is maxing out the RAM. I wouldn't even buy an OctoCore without backing it up with 16 GB RAM.

BTW...16GB kits are ridiculously affordable - the price has come down AGAIN to $433.89:

[www.a1acomputing.com]

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

wanye if you buy my 6 gigs of owc ram 6months in use for 225. I can go to 16gigs deal?

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Ram-there is a max that FCP can use.
On my new MBP 15.4"Oct 08 it can only see 2.5GHz out of the 4GB installed.
Have not yet used my esata expresscard.

ok, ok, let me refine my question a bit. "feels" may have been the wrong word. it FEELS fine. but rendering a fairly simple sequence in FCP and a few simple titles in after effects took what "felt" like longer than it did on my quad. now again, i know im not truly comparing apples to apples and i didnt do side by side testing. but i know when i rendered on the mac pro at my clients office it was DRAMATICALLY faster than my QUAD. and i would have imagined that an 8core intel rendering in AE CS4 (what im told is a multi-core aware app) would have been at least comparable to a G5 quad... regardless of ram quantity

and i know, i know. thanks joey ; ) i do know that adding ram is a sure-fire performance increaser but ive just never seen it make THAT much of a difference in what should be a much more powerful machine

- BUT then again, ive NEVER done this kind of work with so little ram before... maybe thats what im feeling.

anyway. more ram is going in in the next 24hrs so i'll report back...

After Effects EATS RAM. Today at my Studio, I spent 6 hours in an Adobe Demo talking face to face with Adobe's Dave Helmly...

[blogs.adobe.com]

...about CS4 Production Premium and how it eats RAM. He is suggesting 16 Gigs at least to see a really big benefit.

...so YES, there is THAT much of a difference.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I would say you should tune your After Effects prefs for multiprocessor rendering, but with such a paltry amount of RAM, I wouldn't bother. You don't have enough RAM to run more than one aerender process at a time anyway.

For Final Cut, your rendering performance will depend heavily on what format you're cutting. ProRes, for example, is highly optimized for multiple processors. Rendering ProRes on an eight-core system screams compared to rendering some other formats.

But generally, you see a bigger benefit on bigger tasks. If you're rendering out an After Effects comp that takes a minute on a single slow processor, it's not going to take three seconds on a fast eight-processor system. But if your render job takes an hour on an older system, it could conceivably take ten minutes on a modern system. The benefit increases as the run-time of the job goes up. (In nerd-language, faster CPUs improve performance only on the CPU-bound portions of the job.)

Basic editing...just the daily grind of editing....you will note zero difference. It will seem to be the same. But render something...or put something into Compressor and WHAM! That's where you'll see the difference.

And I only have 4GB of RAM. But I only use FCP that only addresses about half that, and Motion that relies on the graphics card. 16GB is WAY OVERKILL for what I do. Might be fine for AE, but I don't use AE like Joey does.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
[itunes.apple.com]

I dunno, Shane. I ran a Compressor job this morning on a freshly-rebooted system, and it ended up consuming about twelve gigs of RAM to run on eight processors.

I thought AE only sees about 3 GBs of Ram due to something in OSX. Am I wrong? Joey? I mean, what on earth do we need 16GBs of ram for? Running 30 apps at same time? Although Jeff says Compressor uses a bunch.

Michael Horton
-------------------

Three gigs per aerender process. Run eight processes, and you can potentially give After Effects a full 24 gigabytes of RAM.

Compressor does the same thing. Each processor gets a separate process (Qmaster calls it an "instance". Nerdily, the addressable-memory limit applies on a per-process basis, since UNIX-like operating systems like Mac OS X give each process on the system a full virtual address space. Thirty-two-bit processes can address between two and four gigabytes of RAM, depending on a lot of implementation-specific details. Sixty-four bit processes can theoretically address ? um ? more. A lot more. My math isn't sufficient to figure out how much more, but it's more than can fit in any Mac you could care to buy.

I think in currently shipping Macs, the limit of addressable memory for 64-bit processes is significantly less than the theoretical maximum, but I don't remember what that limit is.

Damn Jeff, you are such a geek




Michael Horton
-------------------

You know you love it when I talk nerdy.

Mike,

CS4 sees MORE according to what I learned from Dave @ Adobe. You have to look at the big picture. Straight cutters do not exist in my market. If they do - they starve. Everyone these days has AT LEAST 2 or 3 apps open at once...and that EATS RAM.

I am A.D.D. so I just can't stand to wait for apps to launch. On any given project (this is no lie) I have open all at once:

FCP
After Effects
Photoshop Extended
Illustrator
Cinema 4D
VPN Access Client
Remote Desktop
Firefox

In & out apps:

Motion
Soundtrack Pro
Quicktime Pro
Bridge

I use the snot out of "SPACES" and it is fabulous. All these apps FLY on my work 8-Core / 16 GB RAM. I still can't get over how fast my MPB is with only 4 GB RAM. I use the same apps all open at once and it doesn't even breathe hard.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I'm regularly amazed by just how infrequently I have to fire up Photoshop these days. I used to live in Photoshop, back in the day, but now it's barely holding on to its place on my dock.

For me, Final Cut is always running. Even when I don't need it, it's always running, because I know I will need it shortly. After Effects gets a good workout every couple of days, week at the most. And every show I do goes through Soundtrack, 'cause God help me, I'm also the designated sound designer. Color isn't as big a part of my workflow as I'd like, because I'm not good enough at it yet. And I'm spending a lot of time in Maya, in order to get better at it. (I probably should switch to Cinema 4D, but I already have Maya, and I've been using it really badly since the Power Animator days, so I've got just a tiny bit of a head start.)

I'm not usually much for running a ton of things at once, though. My personal workflow is pretty compartmentalized. I live in Final Cut, and take occasional side-trips to After Effects and Soundtrack. I don't have 16 GB of RAM so I can run everything at once; I have it so I can run a few highly RAM-hungry jobs as quickly as possible. And also 'cause it's cheap, and I've got my boss trained to sign my POs without reading them.

Dammit. I shouldn't have posted that in a public forum. HI, BOSS.

I use Cinema 4d because I too used Power Animator back in the day and I hated it so much it drove me to seek out something else. I saw C4D and Maya @ SIGGRAPH '98. Maya immediately dropped out of contention because back then a "Service Contract / License" for Alias was thousands of $$$ per year. C4D was Mac-friendly as well. It runs great on a box loaded with RAM and a juicy GFX card. You should see the card they ordered with my 8-Core @ work - the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 1.5 GB VRAM

[store.nvidia.com]

It eats small pets & children. I can't wait to install C4D. It has an integrated stereo 3D port, so you can use stereo goggles for stereo-in-a-window visualization applications (just in case I download any 3D porn)...

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Yeah, I've heard good things about Cinema 4D. It's highly respected, no doubt. But Maya has mental ray bundled now, and mental ray is preeeeeetty.

...so is C4D's Advanced Renderer...Looky:



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Not bad, not bad at all. Here's something I did today as part of my "how the hell do I use this new mental ray shader" experimentation. The indirect lighting settings need to be optimized; the floor of the room is quite splotchy.

Quote
theoretically address ? um ? more. A lot more. My math isn't sufficient to figure out how much more, but it's more than can fit in any Mac you could care to buy.

I think it's like 16 Exebytes Yes
an exabyte is a billion gigabytes.
Theoretically, 64-bit microprocessors found in many computers can allocate up to 16 exabytes of RAM to a program.[1]

------------------------
Dean

"When I see you floating down the gutter I'll give you a bottle of wine."
Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica.

sorry to have posted such a rudimentary question - but i was just really surprised to see that an off the shelf octocore macpro wouldnt handilly dust a moderately equipped G5 quad... ill do a side by side before my ram installation and after to see what the real world gains are...

Here is some "mom saying" from the old times I worked with Pixar.

Buy more memory - it's cheaper than a therapy.

Andreas

Some workflow tools for FCP [www.spherico.com]
TitleExchange -- juggle titles within FCS, FCPX and many other apps.
[www.spherico.com]

----------
added e-sata card:
----------

FCP:
cut a 2:55 render down to 2:30
a 25 second improvement. significant

AEcs4:
cut a 4:03 render down to 3:44
a 19 second improvement. helped

------------
then added 16 gigs of ram.
------------

FCP:
cut a 2:30 render down to 2:28
a 2 second improvement. YIPPEE!

AEcs4:
cut a 3:44 render down to 3:38
a 6 second improvement. ummm ok.

it seems that adding the e-sata card made the biggest difference.

Wayne, make sure After Effects is set up for multiprocessor rendering, and is tuned for your configuration. If you're not using all eight processors, you're not getting the advantage of all eight processors.

ahhhhh - now THATS what im talking about!!! thanks jeff : )

1st effort cut 3:38 to 2:18

curious. current settings is for 6 processors at 2 gig each. if i apply ALL 8 processors and all ram. will it crash any other open apps?

The only way, practically speaking, for After Effects to crash another program is to take down the whole machine. I've never had After Effects do that.

But if you run out of RAM, your system will start swapping ? that is, using free space on your system disk as RAM. This is mind-bogglingly slow, and will cause everything to grind to a veritable halt. It's best to avoid that.

But heck, if you've got time to mess with it, try setting it to eight processors. (I think you have to edit the After Effects config file for that; google for instructions.) Worst that can happen is that it'll exhaust your RAM, start swapping and force you to reboot to get back to a happy place.

I was looking for information last week about increasing the number of instances to increase encode speed.

On octocore and quads you should conservatively leave half free.

though i am sure 2 free would be just fine. they did make a 1.8 dual that did the whole shabang.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"