After Effects CS5: Working with 64-Bit

After Effects CS5 Tutorials from Creative COW

Richard Harrington
Washington, District of Columbia USA

©2010 Richard Harrington and CreativeCOW.net. All rights reserved.

Article Focus:
In this video tutorial, Richard Harrington shows you how to utilize the 64-bit enhancements in After Effects CS5.

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Comments

Re: After Effects CS5: Working with 64-Bit
by Todd Kopriva

The 3GB per core thing is, I believe, a misunderstanding based on some preset values in the Memory & Multiprocessing preferences dialog box.

I tried to clear things up in a comment at the bottom of this page:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/aftereffects/cs/using/WS9F936D13-E76A-41e4-BF8F...

The gist is that, yes, each core can use a practically infinite amount of RAM. But a practical setting is somewhere in the 2GB-4GB range for rendering processes... and the sky's the limit on the main foreground process that holds RAM preview frames.

I have 24GB of RAM in my computer with 4 physical cores (so 8 with hyperthreading). One of my coworkers has 32GB in a similar machine, and his performance is better.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the 'T' back in 'RTFM' : After Effects Help on the Web
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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share---or if there is something that you'd like to see added or improved---please leave a comment.

Re: After Effects CS5: Working with 64-Bit
by Richard Harrington

The recommendation is 3GB per processor that I got from Adobe... I.E. and 8-core machine works well with 24 GB of RAM.

You CAN assign more... but this is a good recommendation.
I was told a good level to fill up to is 3GB X number of processing cores

That's all I was trying to say

Richard M. Harrington, PMP

Author: Video Made on a Mac, Photoshop for Video, Understanding Adobe Photoshop, Final Cut Studio On the Spot and ATS:iWork

Re: After Effects CS5: Working with 64-Bit
by bruce Rudolph

It would be good to mention that AE CS5 is ONLY 64 bit.
It wont work with a 32 bit system.
Also, all current 32 bit plugins will have to be updated to 64 bit versions before they will work with CS5.
Why couldn't Adobe offer CS5 with both 32 and 64 bit code like So many other smaller software companies do???
It seems kinda lame to me.

64-bit: More than 3 GB per core
by Walter Soyka

Hi Richard,

At around 1:22 in the video, you mention that you can have 3 GB of RAM assigned per core, which on CS4 was due to the 32-bit limit. Now that CS5 is 64-bit, shouldn't each process be able to address far more memory - up to all the available RAM on the system?

See Michael Coleman's blog entry for more details:

http://blogs.adobe.com/keyframes/2010/04/faster.html

How much RAM?
by Dale Paquette

A very timely article - I'm within days of Win-7 64 bit. That said, the article says 3G per core and I'm core 2 so, 6G - Right? I was under the impression that I could and should go to 8G. It makes a difference as I now have 4 X 1G and would only replace 2 with 2G each if 6 really is the limit. I'll go all 4 if I can use 8G.

Thanks, Dale

@Dale Paquette
by Erik Lindahl

The info in the movie is incorrect. After Effects CS5 can address as much RAM as your system can hold regardless of the number of cores. The more RAM the better more or less.

10.5.8??
by Christopher Hill

You mention the OS needing to be 64-bit but your screen shows you running 10.5.8. Isn't that Leopard?

3 GB per core, what?
by Erik Lindahl

I presume AE can address more RAM than 3GB per core? That's something you could do in CS4 already given it's split up in X amounts of processes (in general 1 process per 2 cores was quite optimal). I'd presume with true 64-bit, AE can address the same amount of RAM the OS allows it to allocate which should be AT LEAST 32GB on OSX.

Have I gotten this wrong?

I do reckon your notion of having ≈3-4GB of RAM per core is a reasonable figure to go for but I would think (and hope) AE can adress more than 3GB of RAM per core. Otherwise I've missed something vital in the 64-bit transition.

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