how to Optimize AE CS3 on my Mac
 

I am looking to get the most performance out of AE since I will be starting a bunch of Particular work soon, and lots of color alteration. I believe this is what my system has

* Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (8-core)
* 3GB RAM
* 320GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
- 500 gig internal WD hard drive
* ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB (Two dual-link DVI)
* One 16x SuperDrive
- Leopard

I know nothing about tweaking the Mac OS of After Effects to get the best performance out of what I have, so any help would be great. Thanks

Hi Nathan.

If you don't use Dashboard I suggest to de-activate it. It takes memory and CPU cycles for nothing.
Open the Terminal and enter the following command:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

Followed by:

killall Dock

Like with all Unix commands, capitalization is important, cut and paste the above commands. The "killall" command causes the Dock, the parent process of Dashboard to quit but the Dock is restarted by the OS whenever it quits so the net result is to restart the Dock minus Dashboard.

You might also want to disable Time Machine when rendering. Other than that you might want to add another GB of RAM but I think you are in pretty good shape.

Is the dashboard clicking the side mouse button to where it arranges all open programs to visible view? Or is it the thing with like the calculator and calendar on it (I`m away from the Mac for the day). Thanks for your help. Yea I though I got 2 gigs RAM with it and bought another 2, but I believe I had to knock one out at purchase to save money.

No Dashboard is the one with the calc, the web snippets and the little applications. It's like an additional desktop which runs with a special version of Safari. Each application is like a mini web page open and using JavaScript, which adds computation requirements and memory footprint. If you don't use it you save some resources by disabling it. You can re-enabled it later.

There are several tips for optimizing performance with After Effects in the "Improve performance" section of After Effects Help on the Web.