Caches; To Set Caching Preferences; Maximum Memory Usage; Maximum Ram Cache Size - Adobe AFTER EFFECTS 7.0 Manual

After Effects on the Mac OS X operating system can use up to 3.5 GB of RAM.
After Effects on the 32-bit Windows XP Professional operating system can use up to 3GB of RAM; however, to use
more than 2GB in After Effects, you must configure Windows appropriately. (See the Microsoft website for details.)
After Effects on 64-bit Windows operating systems can use up to 4GB of RAM with no special configuration.

Caches

As you work on a composition, After Effects temporarily stores some rendered frames and source images in RAM,
so that previewing and editing can occur more quickly. After Effects does not cache frames that require little time to
render. Frames remain uncompressed in the cache. You can control how After Effects stores images by setting image-
caching preferences.
After Effects also caches at the footage and layer level for faster previews; layers that have been modified are rendered
during the preview, and unmodified layers are displayed from the cache.
When the cache is full, any new frame added to the cache replaces a frame cached earlier. When you compile frames
for RAM previews, After Effects stops adding frames to the cache when the cache is full and begins playing only the
frames that could fit in the cache. The disk cache is not used for RAM previews. If disk caching is enabled, After
Effects can store rendered items to your hard disk when the RAM cache is full during standard previews.
The RAM cache and disk cache are automatically purged when you quit After Effects.
To purge the RAM cache and disk cache, choose Edit > Purge > Image Caches.
Blue bars in the Timeline panel mark frames that are cached to disk. Green bars mark frames that are cached to RAM.
Choose Show Cache Indicators from the Timeline panel menu to turn the cache indicators on and off.

To set caching preferences

1 Choose Edit > Preferences > Memory & Cache (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Memory & Cache
(Mac OS).
Set any of the following values:
2

Maximum Memory Usage

100% (where 100% equals the amount of physical RAM you have installed) because virtual memory uses hard-disk
space. Values over 200% are not recommended. The default value is 120%.

Maximum RAM Cache Size

value to greater than the default value of 60%, you may encounter problems such as decreased performance when
switching from one application to another. Set this value above 60% only if necessary. You should not set this value
above 90%.
Moves rendered frames to your hard disk when the RAM cache is full. Select a folder to contain
Enable Disk Cache
your cache, and click OK (Windows) or Choose (Mac OS).
For the best performance, select a folder that's on a different physical hard disk than your source footage. If possible,
the folder should be on a hard disk that uses a different drive controller than the disk that contains your source
footage. The disk cache folder can't be the hard disk's root folder.
Maximum Disk Cache Size
Sets the maximum amount of memory to use for any purpose. You can specify values over
Sets the maximum amount of installed RAM to use for cached frames. If you set this
Specifies the number of megabytes of hard disk space to use.
ADOBE AFTER EFFECTS 7.0
637
User Guide