i have a problem. i was trying to render a 10 second short using twixtor for time remapping and tenderbox for deinterlacing, and the make movie render was going to take 4hours(jeez). i canceled the render and my computer was unstable. i have an hp with 2.53 ghz proc, 512 ddr ram, and 80 gig hard drive. i am down to only 10 gigs on my hard drive, so i am about to back up a lot of my files to dvd.

will another stick of 512 or 1024 of ddr significantly improve these crazy render times? i am not trying to take days to render 3 min. music videos.

is an apple computer with final cut pro a great deal faster and better than premiere plus after effects?

HP Pavilion Desktop PCs - Motherboard Specifications, FIC VG31


FEATURE/SPECIFICATION
DESCRIPTION

Motherboard supplier
FIC

System BIOS supplier
FIC/Award

Form factor
uATX

Processor brand
Intel

Processor socket type
mPGA478 (Socket-478)

Processor family
Pentium® 4,
(Northwood, Willamette)
Willamette-Celeron

Maximum Processor core frequency
<=2.66 GHz Northwood,
2.0 GHz Willamette
<= 1.9 GHz Celeron-Willamette

Processor front side bus frequency
400/533 MHz

Chipset name
845G

Chipset North Bridge and revision
--

Chipset South Bridge and revision
ICH4

Super I/O
SMSC LPC47M192

Flash BIOS device
4 Mb Flash

Memory type
DDR

Memory speed
PC2100/PC1600

Memory sockets
2 DIMM

Maximum memory
2 GB

256Mbit memory support
Yes

Graphics supplier
Intel

Graphics configuration
Down, In Chipset

Onboard graphics memory
UMA, up to 48 MB

Graphics connector (AGP)
AGP 4X

TV-out device
none

TV-out configuration
none

Audio configuration
AC'97 Down

AC'97 CODEC device
Realtek ALC201

Audio jacks (legend below)
M,LI,LO

M
Microphone

LI
Line in

LO
Line out

SO
Speaker

M/G
Midi/Game

CD-in jack
2

Internal Speaker-Out/Line-Out/Headphone-Out Header
Speaker out header

Ethernet 10/100 LAN supplier
Realtek RTL8100(B)L

Ethernet configuration
Down

IDE UDMA modes
ATA-100/66/33

Expansion slots (AGP/PCI/Exten)
AGP, 3 PCI

USB specification
USB 2.0

USB ports (front)
2

USB ports (rear)
4

Serial, Parallel, Floppy, PS2 Keyboard and Mouse
1S, 1P, 1F, PS2 K+M

Serial Port front chassis option
No

Fan Headers (CPU, System, Power supply)
CPU, System

Available Manufacturing Options (legend below)
-G, A, S,

A
Audio down on motherboard

C
External L2 cache on motherboard

E
1394 on motherboard

G
Graphics down (on motherboard or in chipset)

L
LAN on motherboard (Ethernet)P - PCMCIA slot

S
S3 power management support

T
TV-out on motherboard

U
Graphics card (up, not on motherboard)

W
Microsoft® Windows XP hardware compliant

you will see a big improvement, ae will cache frames into ram instead reading them of the hd, there is 1000% speed diff when you compare ram to hd.....

by the way things ae likes

1. procs the more the better
2. again ram, ae eats it up, there is no hd that can compare with ram speed
3. hd speed, you will eventually need a seperate and fast av drive, we use 15,000 scsci drive array, it makes a world of difference
5. bus speed ae is all about reading and writing, of course this is probably the least likly bottle neck for ae, but if you buy a new system look for a fast bus

i really appreciate that helpful information. i'm looking to take my ram up to the full two gigs, i'm hoping that i can then do some serious rendering in after effects. you mentioned the second scsi hard drive, how much is it? will i get great quality with an external firewire hard drive?

There's only so much you can speed it up using RAM, but yes, you will definitely see a speed increase. Hard drive speed isn't nearly as important, unless you're rendering at more than, say, 25MB/s, which you're probably not.

if after effects is still going to give me 1000:1 rendering times, will i be better off with combustion? is there a program out there for pc that is much better for compositing than after effects?

thank you rob and jon for all of the help.

RAM is like air, the more the better.

Also, RAM is so cheap I'd max your machine out if you can afford it. It's 50 times cheaper than it was 3 years ago.

Murph

thanks chris, i just priced some from best buy 2gigs ddr for $140.00

i don't think it is the ram. i have 768mb ddr 2100 ram running on athalon xp 1800+ and can render a 10 minute video deinterlaced, de artifacted and with film looks filters applied in about 8hours or less. it is probably your start up files eating up your resources. check for spyware or your background applications and terminate unwanted ones. or if oyu have win xp, go to start -> run -> type in "msconfig" -> click start-up tab -> uncheck suspicious look startup programs.

<<<-- Originally posted by Patrick Falls : thanks chris, i just priced some from best buy 2gigs ddr for $140.00 -->>>

um $140 for 2gigs of ddr ram? that must be some really crappy ram...

Combustion might not be much faster than AE. I consider combution slow. The faster ones are Shake and Digital Fusion/DFX+. Since Shake is no longer supported on Windows, Digital Fusion is currently the best/fastest compositing software on Windows.

I was selling DFX+ 4 on ebay, but it's just sold.

originally posted by danny tan

"um $140 for 2gigs of ddr ram? that must be some really crappy ram..."

oh, ooh, let me see if i still have the reciept. the brand is SpecTek Select 266 mghz pc2100. the original price was $69.00 with a $20.00 mail in rebate. the other ram was $150.00. i forgot the brand. so with this cheap ram, i'm not getting the power that i can get with the brand name ram? the only had sticks of 512, so i could only upgrade by one stick.

Generally speaking, the reason techie folks steer away from no-name or not-well-known-name Ram, is because their specifications aren't as precise as well known makers such as Samsung.

This doen't mean you aren't getting the most use out of your RAM, but it does mean that if you start having goofy problems with your computer, it makes it harder to pinpoint because it might be the RAM.

I learned a long time ago that it was well worth it to spend a few extra bucks to get quality RAM from a well known and respected manufacturer.

If you get BSD errors (Blue Screen of Death) or crash a lot, it may be one or more of your RAM sticks.