Adobe 12040118 - After Effects Standard Tutorial page 539

The memory requirements of a layer increase under several circumstances, including the following:
Increasing the project's color bit depth
Increasing the composition resolution
Using a larger source image
Enabling color management
Adding a mask
Adding per-character 3D properties
Precomposing without collapsing transformations
Using certain blending modes, layer styles, or effects, especially those involving multiple layers
Applying certain output options, such as 3:2 pulldown, cropping, and resizing
Adding shadows or depth-of-field effects when using 3D layers
After Effects requires a contiguous block of memory to store each frame; it cannot store a frame in pieces in fragmented memory. For information
about how much RAM is required to store an uncompressed frame, see
Note: For tips on decreasing memory requirements and increasing performance, see Improve performance by simplifying your project.
Purging memory (RAM)
Occasionally, After Effects may display an alert message indicating that it requires more memory to display or render a composition. If you receive
an out-of-memory alert, free memory or reduce the memory requirements of the most memory-intensive layers, and then try again.
You can free memory immediately with commands from the Edit > Purge menu:
All Memory
Image Cache Memory
Note: In After Effects CS6, the Edit > Purge submenu commands were renamed to clarify that the commands don't affect disk-cached frames.
In After Effects CS6, the Edit > Purge > Video Memory command has been removed.
Troubleshooting memory issues
Error: "Unable to allocate enough memory to render the current frame...."
Either decrease the memory requirements for the rendering of this frame, or install more RAM.
Error: "Unable to allocate [n] MB of memory...."
Either decrease the memory requirements for the rendering of this frame, or install more RAM.
Error: "Image buffers of size [width]x[height] @ [depth] bpc ([n] GB) exceed internal limits..."
Decrease the memory requirements for the rendering of this frame.
Note: The maximum amount of memory that one frame can occupy is 2 GB.
Error: "Memory allocation of [n] GB exceeds internal limits..."
Decrease the memory requirements for the rendering of this frame.
Note: The maximum size for any single memory allocation is 2 GB.
Online resources about memory and multiprocessing
For a video that demonstrates some of the advantages of a 64-bit After Effects application and how to allocate memory to After Effects and other
applications, see the Adobe website.
Storage requirements for output files
Use the following formula to determine the number of megabytes required to store one uncompressed frame at full resolution:
(height in pixels) x (width in pixels) x (number of bits per channel) / 2,097,152
Note: The value 2,097,152 is a conversion factor that accounts for the number of bytes per megabyte (2 ), the number of bits per byte (8), and
the number of channels per pixel (4).
Some example frame sizes and memory requirements, in megabytes (MB) per frame:
DV NTSC (720x480) frame in an 8-bpc project: 1.3 MB
Storage requirements for output files.
20
To the top