Category: ramblings

AE CS5 Optimum Memory Settings & Performance

Apr 24, 2011 ramblings

After I upgraded to After Effects CS5 recently, I found that my rendering was a lot more sluggish than it used to be. Thankfully, I found this FAQ item on Adobe’s forums, and following the suggestions there — especially those about recommended memory-per-core settings — really got me back on track.

For the record, I’m working on a MacBook Pro with a 2.66 GHz Core i7 processor (that means 4 virtual cores on top of 2 real cores, due to hyperthreading) and 8 GB of RAM. The best balance for me ended up being assigning 1.5 GB of RAM to other apps, and 1.5 GB of RAM per render core, with 3 cores available for multi-processing for renders. Lower than that, and I wasn’t getting very good performance; higher than that, and it was even worse, because AE started paging RAM out to disk and that was killing performance.
The War of Art

Mar 5, 2011 ramblings

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

At first I found the definition of Resistance (uppercase ‘R’) intriguing — a personification of the reasons you’re afraid to finish, why you procrastinate. As you progress through the book, though, the […]
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Home Made Egg Nogs

Dec 9, 2010 3 min ramblings

According to the taste test I did a couple of years back for an egg nog-focused podcast (that was, ultimately, never quite completed), we did several home-made nog recipes based on various combinations of dairy and liquor.

The one that won our never-before-revealed taste test was this recipe from the folks at the marketing department […]
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Regarding Your Restaurant’s Website

Nov 27, 2010 ramblings

Dear Restaurant,

I really enjoy your comestibles! But your website makes it a little hard to find the information I need.

When I go to a restaurant website, I’m usually out somewhere, hungry, accessing it from my phone, and I’m looking for these three things, in this order:

First of all, let me […]
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Figlio (1994?-2010)

Nov 24, 2010 ramblings

Figlio was my first real pet, and by “real,” I mean “not a goldfish.” My dad didn’t want any mammalian pets in the house, and so I never had one as a child. We adopted Figlio a little over six years ago from a lawyer whose fiancé was allergic to cats. She hid under the […]
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What George Lucas can learn from Bruce Campbell (and AAlgar)

Sep 30, 2010 ramblings

Almost a decade ago, I first met Bruce Campbell at his book signing for “If Chins Could Kill” at a bookstore in Arlington, VA that no longer exists. Of course, “meeting” a celebrity at any sort of signing can hardly be said to be a meeting at all. Maybe you get a minute […]
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Pro Applications Update 2010-02

Sep 21, 2010 finalcutprose, ramblings
Update to Final Cut Studio applications ~~today~~ on 15 September, including these lovelies (among others):
- FCP: Closed captioning data is now preserved when outputting to AJA Io HD with Print to Tape/Video.
- FCP: XML export now retains the carriage return when working with text and third-party applications.
- FCP: Several memory fragmentation issues have been resolved.
- Compressor: Adds a compression setting optimized for iPad and iPhone 4.
Go get it!

Category: ramblings

AE CS5 Optimum Memory Settings & Performance

The War of Art

Home Made Egg Nogs

Regarding Your Restaurant’s Website

Figlio (1994?-2010)

What George Lucas can learn from Bruce Campbell (and AAlgar)

Pro Applications Update 2010-02

Mark Boszko