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.
Why does after effects require more memory to complete a task?
If your running 8GB or 16GB of RAM you may end up getting an error message from After Effects saying that it requires more memory to complete a task . This could happen for a number of reasons. I’ve had it happen to me in the past because I had 4 other applications running in the background that were eating up memory allocation.
Why do I need RAM for after effects?
In short, RAM is needed in After Effects to allow your computer to quickly access data, instead of your computer going to the hard drive to search for that data. Think of RAM like book shelf, on this book shelf you have added all of the books that you want direct access to at any time.
Why does after effects take so long to load?
After Effects must use memory and processor resources to update open panels, which may slow the work that you are doing in another panel. Create a region of interest. If you are working on a small part of your composition, limit which portion of the composition is rendered to the screen during previews. See Region of interest (ROI).
If you run applications other than those with which After Effects shares a memory pool, and you don’t allocate adequate memory to other applications, performance can be greatly reduced when the operating system swaps RAM to the hard disk. Stop or pause resource-intensive operations in other applications, such as video previews in Adobe Bridge.