After Effects Using Up A TON of RAM

[Walter Soyka]

[Ashley Ripka] “I have been working in After Effects CS6 for a while. All of a sudden it’s using up 26GB of RAM out of the 32GB I have available on my iMac. I am constantly clearing out my cache in AE, I am not running any other programs. I have restarted my computer. Nothing seems to work. I am working in low-res in after effects, and I dont even have anything complicated on my COMP. I only have one COMP actually. 7 Video layers and three photo layers, that’s all. I can not figure this out, it’s slowing my work process down and it’s a little frustrating. I also have Mulitprocessing off.”

What exactly is slowing you down? Ae caches as much as possible to try to speed up your work. RAM is meant to be used — free RAM is wasted RAM.

If you want Ae to take less RAM, you can increase the amount of memory available to other applications in the memory and multiprocessing preferences.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Dave Simpson]

Hi Ashley,

One thing you might want to check is the resolution or size of the photos in your comp. If they are a lot larger than you need for the comp size you are working with, then you could always resize them in Photoshop or another program then bring them into AE. This will save AE from having to deal with all of the resolution that you may not even need.

Dave Simpson

[Ashley Ripka]

I can’t scrub through the footage without it lagging like crazy. If I go to import video or photos, I get the pinwheel.

What would I check for in the preferences? I’m not using warp stabilizer or rotobrush. Keylight is probably the biggest effect I’m using.

[Walter Soyka]

[Ashley Ripka] “I can’t scrub through the footage without it lagging like crazy. If I go to import video or photos, I get the pinwheel.”

Oh, bummer.

Did this start happening all of a sudden? Did anything change on your system around the time you first noticed the problem? Have you rebooted? Do you have the latest updates installed? Have you tried clearing the disk cache, the conformed media cache, or resetting the Ae preferences?

[Ashley Ripka] “What would I check for in the preferences?”

I was referring to “Preferences > Memory and Multiprocessing > RAM reserved for other applications.”

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Dave Simpson]

You could also launch Activity Monitor to see if there is anything working in the background that could be causing you grief. I do know that a helper app called “Quick Look Helper” can randomly cause memory problems. You can just hit the stop process button inside Activity monitor to correct that one.