Hi!

I`m just buying a new Core i7 editing machine, and wondering if there is need to buy 12 gb of ram. Can After effects use that much ram? Is 6 gb enough? I need to know because of motherboard...

Thanks in advance

on AE support page I found the following:

"After Effects on 64-bit Windows operating systems can use up to 4 GB of RAM with no special configuration for each After Effects process.
In this form of multiprocessing, each background process renders its own frame and runs on a separate processor core (CPU). The number of processes used to render multiple frames simultaneously is never more than the number of processors"

As I understand this you can assign max 4gb of memory to each core meaning 16gb of memory for a quadcore, but I guess you still need to leave some for your own OS to operate.

This whitepaper covers the topic pretty well at least as a high level discussion of 64-bit performance. The particulars on After Effects are on pages 3 and 4.

http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/production/pdfs/cs4_production_premium_64bit_wp.pdf

Note their tip at the end of page 4:

"For After Effects, be sure you have the 9.0.1 update, and adjust the amount of memory
per core for the Memory & Multiprocessing option under Preferences. After Effects will
also instance itself, but it does this per CPU core, and each core can use 4GB."

I just found a more detailed article:

Adobe After Effects CS4 * Memory & Multiprocessing preferences (http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WSDD65B476-971A-48e9-A5FD-D90E9A2B996E.html)

Hope that helps.....