Memory and storage | cs5.5 and earlier – Adobe After Effects User Manual
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Memory and storage | CS5.5 and earlier
RAM Reserved For Other Applications
Memory (RAM) usage in 64-bit After Effects
Advantages of a 64-bit application and 64-bit address space
Memory & Multiprocessing preferences
Memory pool shared between After Effects, Premiere Pro, Encore, and Adobe Media Encoder
Memory & Multiprocessing Details dialog box
Memory (RAM) requirements for rendering
Purging memory (RAM)
Troubleshooting memory issues
Online resources about memory and multiprocessing
Storage requirements for output files
Caches: RAM cache, disk cache, and media cache
If you're using After Effects CS6 or later, see Memory and Storage | CC, CS6.
Memory (RAM) usage in 64-bit After Effects
Advantages of a 64-bit application and 64-bit address space
The maximum amount of RAM that a 32-bit application can use is 4 GB, which is much less than the amount of RAM that can be installed in
modern computers and addressed by 64-bit operating systems. After Effects CS4 was a 32-bit application, and it was only able to use more than 4
GB of RAM by starting separate instances (processes) of the After Effects CS4 application to render multiple frames simultaneously. After Effects
CS5 is a 64-bit application, so each process can use all of the RAM addressed by 64-bit Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Mac OS operating
systems.
The ability of After Effects to use large amounts of RAM per process provides several advantages:
You can render much larger compositions—both for preview and for final output—with larger frame sizes and larger source files.
RAM previews can be much longer.
You can work with higher color bit depths without encountering memory limitations.
After Effects can cache more items, which reduce the frequency with which frames and components of frames are re-rendered.
Memory & Multiprocessing preferences
Set memory and multiprocessing preferences by choosing Edit > Preferences > Memory & Multiprocessing (Windows) or After Effects >
Preferences > Memory & Multiprocessing (Mac OS).
As you modify settings in the Memory & Multiprocessing dialog box, After Effects dynamically updates helpful text in the dialog box that reports
how it will allocate and use memory and CPUs.
The RAM Reserved For Other Applications preference is relevant whether or not Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously is selected. The settings
in the After Effects Multiprocessing category are relevant only if Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously is selected.
Todd Kopriva provides information about optimum memory and processor settings on the
Increase this value to leave more RAM available for the operating system and for applications other than
After Effects and the application with which it shares a memory pool. (See
Memory pool shared between After Effects, Premiere Pro, Encore, and
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