About cachingAs After Effects displays a frame or compiles a RAM preview, it places each of those displayed or compiled frames into a cache. Once the frames are cached, they display or play back quicker because they are now playing or displaying from RAM. Currently cached frames are designated by green bars in the time ruler. When you advance either sequentially or nonsequentially through frames in your composition, or play back using the Standard Preview option, each of the frames is compiled and placed into the cache, and the green bars appear in the Timeline at the point where the cached frame occurs. When you compile a RAM preview, the frames you designate to be included in the preview are compiled, and the green bars appear in the time ruler to indicate which frames were cached. If you make a change to any of the cached frames in the composition, the cache purges only the frames affected by that change. You can also manually purge the entire cache. Once the cache is full, and you continue to advance either sequentially or nonsequentially through frames in your composition, any additional frame added to the cache replaces the earliest cached frame in order to make room for the new frame. When you compile frames for RAM previews, once the cache is full, After Effects ceases adding frames to the cache and the preview begins playback of only the frames that could fit in the cache. The size of the cache is limited to the amount of RAM available to After Effects. The number of frames that can occupy the cache depends on the composition settings. To purge the cache: Make sure that the Timeline window is selected, and choose Edit > Purge > Image Caches. |