Recently I have noticed that AE eats all my 12GB of ram during renders, and the renders are taking longer than they should. I'm using CS4 on a PC.

Anyone know what is wrong?

Thanks

RAM will be used - the more you have, the more that will be used by AE. But rendering time is determined by your CPU, not your RAM. Can your CPU handle all that RAM?

For me, every render takes longer than it should... :-)

AE should allow other programs to use the RAM they've allocated, but depending on your memory settings, AE will reach out and grab all the system resources it can get to work with...and you want it to.

I'm not sure what "too long" is... Is it rendering slower than a previous version of the software? ...or slower than a previous machine?

Do you have anything to compare it to?

Something odd that I notice: when using Dynamic Link in a Premiere timeline, I watch the ram and cpu usage for all AE processes, and it never uses all my ram. However, if I just render the AE comp in AE, all my ram gets used up within 15-20 seconds.

When I say that it takes longer than it should - its due to AE using a higher % of cpu while the ram usage is increasing. But, as soon as all ram is used, AE's cpu usage slows way down. One of my thoughts about this: I am using an i7 with Hyperthreading enabled. The Adobe guy around here said that AE can't use or take advantage of HT, but I see all my cores/threads being used during renders. And since I have AE set to 2GB per core, AE wants 16GB minimum for 8 cores/threads (and I only have 12GB).

Try to string together a cheap render farm if render times are out of control. But rendering usually takes too much time anyway...that's part of the process.

What filters are you using? The Magic Bullet Suite I've noticed has this effect on rendering times, the output is amazing, but the render times are terrible vs the built-in plugins.