After effects installation, Harddrives & Rendering

[Josh Brine]

good to know thanks.

im guessing AE will be writing to and reading from the cache for playback etc? so it makes sense to be fast. would 256gb SSD be adequate in your opinion?

[Walter Soyka]

[Josh Brine] “im guessing AE will be writing to and reading from the cache for playback etc? so it makes sense to be fast. would 256gb SSD be adequate in your opinion?”

Yes. Faster is better, and bigger is better. The limit is your budget.

Ae caches not only your final rendered frames, but also the individual renders for each layer in your composite, when caching is faster than re-rendering.

Consider a 10-layer animation that is 900 (30 seconds at 30 fps) frames long. It will cache 900 rendered frames of the composition, but it can also cache 900 frames for each individual layer for up to 9,900 frames total. Why store so many frames? This way, when you make a change to one of those layers but not the other nine, Ae can read the 9 layers back from the cache to use for the final composite instead of re-rendering them all.

Additionally, each of these layer-frames is lossless and uncompressed. Fully caching this 10-layer, 30 second animation, at 1920×1080 and 8bpc, would consume about 76 GB of disk space. Of course, as you make tweaks, many more layer-frames will be cached. 256 GB can go pretty quickly.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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