Won’t do a full RAM Preview???

[Dave Johnson]

You could:

[1] lower the resolution of your comp viewer from full to half
[2] do a SHFT+ RAM Preview and set it to skip 1 or 2 frames
and/or
[3] buy more RAM (and make sure you don;t have a bunch of other stuff running and eating up resources while working in AE)

[Kevin Camp]

ram preview length is limited by the amount of ram available to load the preview.

to a longer duration into ram, you’ll need to restrict the preview in some other way.

an easy way is to set the resolution/downsample setting att he bottom of the preview window from ‘full’ to ‘half’ or less. going from full to half will increase the number of frames you can cache to ram by 4 times, but previews wil be half resolution.

another easy way is to set ae to skip frames during previews. you set the skip option in the time controls palette (window>time controls).

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Todd Kopriva]

David and Kevin are right.

If you’re using the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing feature, then there’s one more thing that you can try to squeeze a little more duration out of your RAM previews:

Dedicate more RAM to the foreground process, since that’s the one whose address space stores the frames for RAM previews.

In After Effects CS4, this is pretty intuitive. There’s a slider that says “Longer RAM Preview” at one end and “Faster Rendering” at the other. You get to choose.

In After Effects CS3, the process was more arcane and less reliable, involving changing the Maximum RAM Cache Size value.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[First Last]

Drop the RAM preview resolution down to half and shrink your Comp’s window down to 50%. It’s essentially 100%… essentially…

Production Associate
Bend, Oregon, United States

[John Terrone]

Help!!! I’m working on Mac OS X system Mac Pro. 2*2.28 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 20GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-Dimm, plenty of room on my hard drive(s) My settings in AE are set to have Longer RAM Preview using 1.79 GB for foreground with 14.63GB as Background memory.(CS4) I’ve got my settings to have AE use 16.42GB of RAM and I still cannot RAM preview a 60 second clip with quarter resolution set. Am I missing something or does anyone have any additional advise not listed on this blog? Thanks!

John Terrone