…get lots of RAM, and if you use Windows, move to Vista 64 or Windows 7 64*.
You’ll be glad you did, as both After Effects and Premiere can address 4GB of RAM *per processor core*. That means that on an 8-core Mac Pro or Vista 64 rig, you could devote up to 32 gigs of RAM just to AE or Premiere.
Will all that memory benefit your projects? Depends on how big they are. Writer Jan Ozer produced some pretty amazing results with big jobs, in one case cutting rendering time from 68 minutes to ~10. Adobe DV evangelist Dennis Radeke has more info on the subject.
* Re: XP64, to quote the spinners in Blade Runner, “Move on, move on…”
Note that you have to check the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously checkbox in Memory & Multiprocessing preferences for After Effects to use multiple processors:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WSDD65B476-971A-48e9-A5FD-D90E9A2B996E.html
It would be easier to make the move to 64-bit if companies like Alien Skin, OnOne and Nik had their plug-ins for Photoshop that were 64-bit compatible.
As it is right now I don’t want to waste time or space jumping between 32-bit and 64-bit just because of plug-ins.
Shame I could sure use that extra when when editing videos. Hopefully it will come in time.
Maybe Adobe could start shooting the plug-in developers with a cattle prod to get them moving quicker. š
Now if we could just get scene splitting for HDV tape sources, Premier Pro CS4 would be wonderful.
And, in the case of AE, it’s a bit of a kludge as Todd points out above. I’ve found multiprocessing to be somewhat unstable, and with large projects you have to wait for the project to save every time you launch a RAM preview. (which can be annoying)
I’m looking forward to a true 64-bit AE.
(In the meantime, a great alternative to AE multiprocessing is the Background Render Script, which is free and will let you launch multiple renders at once. You have to render to frames though, so it needs to be a fairly long render to make it worthwhile. Also, Adobe introduced a bug in CS4 that causes AE to crash on exit when the Background Render panel is open… Can we get a fix for that?)
How about Adobe hurry’s up with 64bit versions of CS for OS-X?
[Well, we’ve already beaten Apple to the 64-bit punch on their own platform *by a full year* with Lightroom.
As for Photoshop, I stated earlier that the scope of the changes is too great to let us do them as an update for CS4, so that means it’ll be another 12-18 months before a 64-bit-native Mac version of PS hits the street. (That’s based on a presumption of an 18-24 month development cycle, starting from CS4 shipping in Oct. ’08.)
No one wants more badly than I do to deliver 64-bit parity between Mac & Windows as soon as possible. We’re playing the hand of cards we were dealt, and that’ll take some time. –J.]
Hello John,
Here is a video short that was created by filmmaker Bruce Branit.
I wanted to make you aware of it if you haven’t yet seen it.
http://vimeo.com/3365942?pg=embed&sec=
[Wow, thatās really excellent! Many thanks for the link. (The funny thing is that I was thinking about ā405: The Movieā in the last day or soātrippy.) Iāll blog this shortly. Thanks, Cris. –J.]