Hi all,
I'm experiencing MP issues with after effects CS6.
My specs are:
2 x 2.4Ghz 6-Core Xeon
32GB RAM
OSX version 10.7.5
I know that countless posts exist detailing this particular issue, however I haven't found any solutions to my specific problem, which I believe
lies in the size of the job. It's 5.5 minutes of animation. Very few effects are used. Every layer is a vector graphic. There's over 270 layers in this
project. Collapse transform is on most of the layers - yes I know that CT places more load on the CPU, and no, turning off CT and resizing all my
comps is not an option. 3.5 Minutes of animation at 512 x 288 was taking over 5 hours to render. I noticed that CPU usage, after around 2 min
into the render, dropped to 0.5%. I upped the RAM allocation to 4GB per core (3GB was the initial setting), and the rendertime dropped to 1 hour
which was great.
I have now completed the job, however, I am once again experiencing the same issue with cpu usage dropping to 0.5%, which is strange, as the ram
usage for each core is still around 2GB, so I am not sure whats going on. Seems that the further along the render gets, the system begins to slow until
it grinds to a halt. There seems to be very little HDD activity, so virtually no swapping either. I typically purge all memory before hitting the render button,
as well as leaving on caps lock to prevent the viewer from updating, so I am at a loss as to what's going on. My conclusion is that ae is not handling the
sheer number of layers that well. I have also noticed that ae keeps overwriting my preferences that I've added -I have 1.5,2,3, and 4GB per core as options
in the pref file, but not all of them appear in ae. I don't have any SSD drives installed either.
Does anybody have any suggestions? Do I need to just render the project in 2 parts?
Chris