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chrisbrearley
Inspiring
September 28, 2022
Released

Disk playback instead of RAM,

  • September 28, 2022
  • 19 replies
  • 1812 views
I get that 20 years ago hard drives weren't the quickest and there was a limited choice in codecs so it made sense to playback from RAM. But now we all have SSDs and DNxHR exists I don't get why AE has not been re-written to playback straight from a hard drive rather than moving it into RAM first. It would be great for AE to playback from disk with a choice of codec and bit depth dependent on a users needs and system capability, much in the way that Resolve does with smart cache (see pic). Uncompressed I gather would be a strain on most systems but this is overkill anyway, certainly for playback - I challenge anyone to point out any differences between uncompressed and DNxHR HQ and if people wanted to keep working uncompressed then the option could always be there to playback from RAM but for me and I would assume many others 10bit DNx would be fine. This will mean longer timelines and smoother playback as AE isn't having to move disk cache to RAM for stuff further up the timeline when playing back.

    19 replies

    J
    Community Manager
    Joy RaisinghaniCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    July 11, 2025

    This Feature has been released. Please download the latest and greatest version of AE 2025 to take benefit of Playback from Disk. 

      I
      InfiniteWhale
      Known Participant
      February 12, 2024

      It's a slower and outdated way of doing it

        T
        tristansummers
        Inspiring
        March 29, 2023

        It wouldn't need to be compressed at all. ten years ago you got realtime footage playback even with tiff seqs off of ioFX cards because they could load 5 frames simultaneously. PCIe4 M2 cards are easily fast enough. Puffin had a supercache twenty years ago. It is just bad resource allocation in after effects. Layers are cached seperately so footage should be able to be cached direct to the cache. Maybe the proclivity settings could be based on system analysis, so that a PCIe4 M2 drive would not need to go to RAM? 

        Ultimately though users really need to understand that AE combines two layers into one, one at a time and that can never be real time. Premiere etc plays back source footage direct with some simple GPU accelerated effects. very very different. 

        JBrown321
        JBrown321
        Known Participant
        March 29, 2023

        @Warren Heaton10841144 then maybe it could be an option or mode that can be enabled/disabled the team could implement for real time playback when you're just dealing with footage playback?  

        Warren Heaton
        Community Expert
        Warren HeatonCommunity Expert
        Community Expert
        March 27, 2023

        @JBrown321 

        That would mean that our Composition is compressed rather than uncompressed.  While that's great for video editing, that's horrible for motion graphics and compositing.

        tomasf92211176
        tomasf92211176
        Participant
        September 28, 2022
        Doesn't the new NVME 2.0 standard make this feature much more plausible for fast SSDs? Watch this vid from 0:40-2:40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qej76srlFh0
        mrBeep
        mrBeep
        Known Participant
        September 28, 2022
        Rendering and playing same sequence in PP or Davinci is 2x faster or more.
        JBrown321
        JBrown321
        Known Participant
        September 28, 2022
        Perfect example: If I can hit spacebar and watch my footage play realtime inside PP, why can't AE? It's 2020 and for something as simple as a piece of footage, it should play immediately like any editor or video player for that matter!
          TimKurkoski
          Community Manager
          TimKurkoskiCommunity Manager
          Community Manager
          September 28, 2022
          > Agreed, some time ago there was a new feature that said AE can play some video formats directly, without caching - that is bull.

          It is not bull. But your description is not accurate, and the functionality is limited.

          When you start a preview in After Effects, assuming the Cache Before Playback option is not enabled, After Effects will pre-cache video footage (video footage formats only: MOV, MXF, etc.; still image formats aren't included) into it's RAM cache as fast as it possibly can, prior to playback. Basically, this means that as playback moves forward, After Effects will copy frames from the footage into the RAM cache for playback as fast as it can; you can see the green cache marks fill up in the timeline ahead of the CTI. This differs from other cases where After Effects will load the RAM cache one frame at a time as they are rendered, instead of pre-caching the frames without additional rendering, as happens in this case. (That said, After Effects always tries to load frames into the RAM cache as fast as possible. If the comp can be rendered faster-than-real-time, you'll see the green cache marks advance ahead of the CTI, so there's nothing terribly special about this behavior.)

          The major limitation here is that there must be no rendering involved. Only unaffected footage in a comp qualifies for this optimization. Any rendering (transforms, effects, blending modes, color management, etc.) will force the frames into the usual process of rendering before pushing them into the RAM cache.

          The other limitation here is that After Effects can't decode some footage formats quickly. Decoding and debayering 8K raw R3D frames, for example, isn't likely to decode quickly enough to take advantage of this optimization. (Although enabling GPU acceleration in the project settings can help a lot with this.)

          Overall, this is a small optimization, but it is helpful in certain cases and helps streamline the overall rendering pipeline.

          In regards to the overall concept of disk playback vs. RAM playback, I agree that it would be a useful improvement for After Effects.
            K
            kaczorefx
            Known Participant
            September 28, 2022
            Agreed, some time ago there was a new feature that said AE can play some video formats directly, without caching - that is bull. I can play 4 2k DPX streams in realtime in Premiere, AE gives me like 8fps. I can play 12-15 HD Cineform streams in Premiere with almost no frame drops, AE will go like 1fps with so many streams. I don't expect the same performance but come on 😕😕
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