After Effects CS4 on an 8-core Mac Pro, 16g of ram w/ Snow Leopard.
I have animations that shouldn't be much more than an hour to render taking up to 15 hours!!! Also when I click "render" I get a delay (spinning ball) and AE freezes up like that for 10-30 minutes before each render!
I tested the project on another computer, same type of mac pro but with 8g of ram and WITHOUT Snow Leopard, and the renders are done in less than an hour each.
So something is seriously wrong, but I can't imagine what. I've restored the AE preferences and repaired disk permissions, and I'm out of ideas. Anyone know what could cause something like this?
On both computers I have multiprocessing turned ON, to avoid constant image buffer errors.

See "After Effects CS4 on Snow Leopard requires 9.0.2 update" (http://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2009/09/after-effects-cs4-on-snow-leop.html)

You also might want to check out this performance tip: "Performance tip: Don't starve your software of RAM." (http://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2009/12/performance-tip-dont-starve-yo.html)

I've read all that stuff very carefully and my AE is up to date. I use mutliprocessing with Open GL OFF as instructed. I've attached my setting, and I now have 16g of ram but with essentially the same settings. It's confusing to me that with this on AE seems generally slower to work with. I know I have the bar toward faster renders, but the renders are the big problem because of these delays and that they sometimes take "15 hours" till I cancel.

AE CS4 Trial works great at home, without snow leopard. The only thing I haven't tried is to re-install, but I am sure something is very wrong -there is no way this is normal. Do you know why CS4 would have difficulty rendering complex animations on one machine but not another? If not, could you just tell me the exact best settings to utilize 16g of RAM? Since none of them are working for me I would just like to know it's set it up correctly, THEN troubleshoot.

I know AE CS4 has problems with 8 core Macs. I remember reading that you must set AE to use only 6 cores. I am sure you will find more advice in the Mac section.

The most important first step (as mentioned in the article on my blog that I linked to) is to set RAM To Leave For Other Applications to at least 2GB. Mine is set to 3GB on my Mac with 12GB of RAM. I've got 1GB for the RAM cache, and I have 2GB each for four of my eight processors. If I'm doing web video or SD, I knock that down to 1GB each for all eight processors. That works fine for me.

Todd, thanks for that info. What are your recommendations for systems with Intel's Hyperthreading?


Aric, your screenshot shows only 8GB of ram installed in your 09 Mac Pro.

Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing in After Effects CS4 can't take advantage of hyperthreading.

The most important first step (as mentioned in the article on my blog that I linked to) is to set RAM To Leave For Other Applications to at least 2GB. Mine is set to 3GB on my Mac with 12GB of RAM. I've got 1GB for the RAM cache, and I have 2GB each for four of my eight processors. If I'm doing web video or SD, I knock that down to 1GB each for all eight processors. That works fine for me.

I've changed the settings again so that the "minimum allocation is set to 2 GB. Here's a screenshot of my settings. It seems to be fixed now! Could it have been the minimum allocation set to 1 GB that made rendering nearly impossible? The only other thing different I can think of is the "overflow volumes" and "disk cache", could setting those incorrectly have caused my problems? Anyway it seems to be fixed so far.

I couldn't find the "RAM Cache" you mentioned though.

Todd, do you know why AE on Mac shows 16 cores when there is only 8 and AE on my PC shows 4 (1 i7 920)? We are both using the newer Intel Nehalem CPUs that use Hyperthreading, and if his shows 16, one would think mine would show 8.
(Yes, HT is enabled on my PC)

The 30 minute delays came back, but the renders have worked alright so far....