Jun
9
Running Adobe CS4 With 64-Bit Vista
If you spend a lot of time using processor draining video or photo editing workflows with Adobe CS4, you’ve probably thought about upgrading your computer hardware. If you are considering buying a new PC, you should definitely think about installing 64-bit Vista. All Adobe CS4 applications can be optimized on a 64-bit system, giving you the maximum performance possible.
Unfortunately, not many people have spent time using a 64-bit operating system…well unless you have a Mac running OS X Leopard. All newer Macs come standard with a native 64-bit OS, but that’s another story. So, if you use a PC, chances are you are still using a 32-bit version of XP or Vista. If you already have CS4 and are experiencing slowdowns when switching between different applications in your workflow, or you have to render your projects overnight, 64-bit Vista is for you.
The main difference between a Windows 32 and 64-bit system is the usage of RAM. With a 32-bit system, you top out at 4GB. Once Vista is up and running, you actually only have between 2 and 3GB of RAM to work with. This is simply not enough to do any HD video editing in Premiere Pro or open very large files in Photoshop. With a 64-bit Vista system, you can add memory up to 32 GB, or more!
You may have heard that only Photoshop CS4 offers native 64-bit support for Windows Vista. Well, you heard right. However, all of the other CS4 applications like Premiere Pro CS4 and After Effects CS4 were optimized for 64-bit operating systems, allowing them to take advantage of systems with RAM to spare.
Now, upgrading to 64-bit Vista won’t magically make your programs run twice as fast. However, you will notice dramatic differences in speed in labor intensive operations like video rendering and switching between Lightroom and Photoshop. Speed tests by Adobe have shown up to a 200% speed increase in Premiere Pro running on 64-bit Vista with 16GB of RAM, over a 32-bit system with only 4GB of RAM. Not too shabby.
This is all well and good, but how do you get started? First, you need to buy or build a computer with 64-bit Vista in mind. This means spending some extra money on 16 or 32GB of RAM, but with the price of memory at an all-time low, you should be able to buy 16GB for well under $500. You also need to make sure your hard disk(s) are fast enough to keep up. Ideally you want a hard disk that can sustain a data rate up to 20MB per second and spin at 7200 rpms or greater. You can use a RAID array with a couple disks for the best possible performance. When installing Vista 64, you need to make sure it is upgraded to SP1. You will also need to download the latest 64-bit drivers for all of your hardware.
Now that your 64-bit Vista system is up and running, you need to make some adjustments to Adobe CS4 to ensure all of your applications are taking advantage of all that RAM.
-In Premiere Pro CS4, you need to adjust the size of the paging file to twice the amount of installed RAM. So, if you are running 16GB of RAM, you need to allocate 32GB of hard disk space for the paging file. You also need to upgrade to the latest version of Premiere Pro, which ensures it will recognize more than 4GB of RAM.
-In After Effects CS4, go under Preferences – Memory & Multiprocessing to adjust the amount of memory per core.
-All other CS4 applications should take advantage of the extra memory automatically.
Adobe is currently working on designing all Creative Suite applications to work out of the box in a 64-bit environment. However, this will not be a reality until the release of CS5. Also, Microsoft is pushing 64-bit systems even more with their next release of Windows 7 this fall. Eventually, all PC’s will be running a 64-bit operating system, but why not be ahead of the curve right now?
For further reading and additional info, check out these links:
Adobe CS4 Production Premium 64-bit White Paper
Photoshop, Lightroom, and Adobe’s 64-bit Roadmap
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