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'in order to maximise compatibility, After Effects uses the Photoshop library in a way that can cause memory issues (this is all on this list, about 4 years ago).'
Has this been fixed since then?
This is a good question, because I was using CS5 and obviously there have been some major changes since. I haven't dug through the archives to find the original thread, but the jist of what I can remember is that when After Effects uses a Photoshop file, it loads up the actual Photoshop library (i.e. the Photoshop rendering engine) but can't control how it uses memory. Unfortunately the Photoshop library isn't very memory efficient, so if you have large Photoshop files and are on a machine with limited ram - e.g. 12 gig or less - then the computer starts to use virtual memory and everything grinds to a halt. It was a problem I had originally blamed on a poor network, but I realised the problem was exactly the same on Mac and Windows, and at every office I worked at. Sometimes everything would freeze for over 5 minutes and a normal person would think the thing had crashed, but it would eventually start working again. I was stoked when Todd explained the problem and the solution (don't use Photoshop files).
I don't want to hijack the thread with this separate issue, but once I inherited an After Effects project that took 45 minutes PER FRAME to render, using Photoshop files. I cleaned it up and converted the PSD to tiff layers and got the render time down to about 20 seconds per frame. I actually started to write an article on it because I thought it was a curious case, but then I realised I was just writing pages of stuff that was basically bitching and moaning about my co-worker so I let it go… Since then it is more common to find larger amounts of ram in a machine and there have been major upgrades with CS6 and CC, so I'd be interested to hear Todd's input on this matter.
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