memory &disk usage

[se7enhedd]

hi, I'm new to nuke and are battlling to get a comp done for a deadline. I have a 45 sec scene, at 1280x720; Nuke seems fairly slow at reading the footage, and even slower when i do a 3D camera track.
I accept it's going to take a while to do these things, but to try and help I've altered the settings in the memory and disc cache [made them larger] Now Nuke seems even slower and pauses for a few seconds at regular intervals, even when trying to do simple things like mode a node in the tree or open a menu.
is there any guidlines to follow to set the memory & caches for best performance? or is my computer just underpowered --

intel xeon 5130@2ghz
1.99 gb ram
100gb hd - 20.5bd free

[chrisg]

Hi se7enhedd,

2 gigs of RAM isn't much for playback or compositing work in general. What image type is the footage? Nuke prefers reading zipped scanline EXR files. Are you pulling the footage off a networked storage or locally?

You might try pausing the viewer if you don't need to update it, with the P key or the pause icon. You may also try using proxies, which is also in the top. Check your project settings and make sure you're working in your 1280x720 format (you'll need to create a new format) and not a higher res format.

[se7enhedd]

thanks. it's coming off a local disk. there is more ram in my machine but i'm running nuke through bootcamp on 32bit xp, so I guess resources are a little limited compared to the native 64 bit mac side. i've started using the proxies - it runs through ok once it's rendered out, well, it does now i've cleared out the temp files it created - nearly 40gb worth. I'd have thought Nuke would get rid of the cached files once it was quit?
for now, if I keep an eye on that it'll suffice. I may consider going up to 64 bit if i get serious about compositing

[bravo2zero]

Chris nailed it . speed is the issue cpu speed hard disk read and rite time and memory size all comes together to make the rendering and play back better .