Memory (RAM) Depending on the length, resolution, and complexity of your projects, After Effects can often benefit from having very large amounts of RAM available. Larger amounts of RAM allows AE to store more previews in RAM rather than on a cache disk which can result in smoother playback.
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.
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.
One source proposed while there was some definite benefits to the GPU and its internal memory, in After Effects RAM is bigger and more important priority. The problem with any of these hardware technical terms is that one can become easily confused quickly when trying to wrap your head around them.
How much RAM does after effects take up?
For instance if you’re running 16GB of RAM, After Effects may split that in half, with 8GB going to other applications and 8GB going directly to After Effects. The After Effects Preferences Panel: Lot’s of fun things to mess with here! The great thing about this preference is that you can tell After Effects how much RAM to allocate for itself.
The minimum amount of RAM that After Effects needs to run is 8GB. However, Adobe recommends using 16GB of RAM. For my system I run 32GB of RAM which allows After Effects to run incredibly smooth.
This begs the question “Is 8GB RAM enough for after effects?”
The most common answer is: The minimum for using after effects with little lag and run somewhat smoothly is 16GB ram, the recommended is 32 and above. If you play on taking after effects seriously you should probably aim for 32GB but a 16GB one should work as well.
How much does Ram affect the speed of the aoftware?
However, both of these software use Ram to playback videos and process effects. If they don’t have enough RAM they use the HDD memory to store everything they need (just as if it was RAM) and only move it to RAM when needed. This means that RAM directly impacts the speed of the aoftware A LOT!
What is RAM and why do I need It?
When needed your computer will temporarily store data from active programs in RAM, which allows it to work far more quickly and efficiently. Just understand that, unlike a hard drive, the data stored in RAM is erased once the computer is shut down.