10,000 RPM Renders

[grahamdunn]

Hi All,
Does anyone know what kind of improvement you might see using a Raptor or similarly fast drive for rendering?

My plan was to put AE on a 7200 RPM drive, the source video files on a 10,000 RPM Raptor, and then render to the 7200 drive.

Is the Raptor's speed going to make a huge render improvement?

Is rendering back to the 7200 drive with AE on it okay, or should I get a separate 7200 drive to send the renders to? Thanks!

[William_Robinette]

Since you are rendering from AE I am assuming you are do motion graphics/compositing/vfx work in which case the biggest bottle neck will most likely be your CPU/RAM and not the read/write of your HDDs.

[MasterP]

Since you are rendering from AE I am assuming you are do motion graphics/compositing/vfx work in which case the biggest bottle neck will most likely be your CPU/RAM and not the read/write of your HDDs.

Agreed - those fast drives really only come into their own when you use them to either load your OS onto or house your page (swap) file and scratch disks.

You'd be better off upgrading to heaps of RAM and migrating to a 64-bit OS

With more RAM, you end up using the pagefile less - less disk writes=better performance than any HDD :)

[grahamdunn]

Great, thanks guys! I'll save the money on the Raptor then and dump it into the RAM. So far it will be CS3 with a quad core Intel for multiprocessor rendering, so a lot of ram and good graphics card should kick it up a notch. Appreciate the info!

[MasterP]

Just bear in mind that with a non-64bit operating system, you have a 3.5Gig ceiling for RAM (assuming you have 512MB on your graphics card) - any more is not recognized by the OS - so don't load it up above 4 gigs :)

To go above 4 gigs effectively, you'd need to move to a 64-bit OS - and that in itself is a fair bit of effort finding drivers as well as adjusting to it's nuances (especially with Vista)

[MiniMan13]

Ram isnt normally the bottleneck on a render, it makes a big difference when editing it, but not during render, thats all CPU.

[oneinfiniteloop]

Just bear in mind that with a non-64bit operating system, you have a 3.5Gig ceiling for RAM (assuming you have 512MB on your graphics card) - any more is not recognized by the OS - so don't load it up above 4 gigs :)

To go above 4 gigs effectively, you'd need to move to a 64-bit OS - and that in itself is a fair bit of effort finding drivers as well as adjusting to it's nuances (especially with Vista)

Technically, that is correct, but with AE and multiprocessing you can use much more than the 3GB limit. Mutliprocessing enabled will spawn additional instances of AE that can each use up to 3GB. I have 18GB of RAM and I easily use about 12GB's during RAM previews on an 8 core machine with 4 instances enabled. Plus, I can keep Photoshop, Illustrator, FCP, and Cinema 4D open and working smoothly with the extra RAM.

[grahamdunn]

On my dual core iMac I can use multithreaded render (only three gigs of ram, but it splits the processors). On this new one I'm going to build a PC just for After Effects, so it will be a quad-core Intel with XP I bet, but the multithreaded rendering in CS3 should split my 8 gigs to 2 gigs per core or something even without Vista and some crazy drivers?