AE2020 preferences for new Mac Pro

Hi all,

I’m a longtime AfterEffects animator, but I was working on my previous computer (a 2010 Mac Pro running AE2017 v14.2.1) on MacOS Sierra for years before recently upgrading to a new 2019 Mac Pro running AE2020.

It’s been a long time since I setup AfterEffects from scratch, and with my upgraded equipment, I wanted to get some expert advice on the best way to set my preferences for maximum performance and stability. (I’ve been having some RAM preview freeze issues — separate threads that I haven’t been able to troubleshoot so far — and wondering if it perhaps is related to my initial preference setup).

Here’s my new system:

Mac Pro 7,1 (2019)

MacOS Catalina (v10.15.2)

CPU: 3.2 GHz 16-Core Intel Xeon W

Memory: 384 GB 2933 MHz DDR4

GPU: AMD Radeon Pro Vega II 32BG

Displays: Two 27” 5K LG UltraFine displays, connected to Bus 0 & Bus 1 of the GPU (as recommended by Apple), running at 60Hz

My system software/application is installed on the SSD that came with the computer.

My AE projects and PSD files used on the projects are on a Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe card with four 2TB SSDs, which I have merged together as a single 8TB drive using RAID 0.

My scratch disk and footage folder (holding a ton of stock footage elements used in my projects) are on a second Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe card with four 2TB SSDs, which I have merged together as a single 8TB drive using RAID 0.

Both 8TB SSDs have plenty of free space for future projects (3-4 TBs) and both RAID 0 SSD drives get backed up every night to local spinning external drives as well as the cloud.

Current AE preferences/questions for AE2020:

Media & Disk Cache/Disk Cache: 1000 GB, stored on my second Sonnet M.2 8TB SSD (RAID 0).

Question: Is it OK to have such a large disk cache (my previous one was 600 GB on a 1TB SSD)?

Question: Is it OK to have my disk cache on a RAID 0 SSD? Or should the disk cache be on a separately mounted single SSD? I could always reformat this Sonnet card to be a 6TB SSD (three 2TB SSDS merged using RAID 0) and have the fourth 2TB stick be my scratch/cache drive for both AE and Photoshop.

Memory/Installed RAM: 384 GB, RAM reserved for other applications: 100 GB.

Question: Should this number be higher or lower? My previous computer had 64 GB of RAM with 3 GB reserved for other applications.Obviously I have way more RAM to play with on this new setup. But is 100 GB overkill? Should this number be way lower? I plan on using BGRenderer or RenderGarden when doing final renders, not sure if this requires more RAM to be available for other applications.

Previews/GPU Information: Texture Memory: 1638MB. Question: Should I increase or decrease this number, or just leave it alone? My GPU is an AMD Radeon Pro Vega II with 31.98 GB total memory.

Import/Video Footage: Enable hardware accelerated decoding (I have this checked).

Video Preview/Enable Mercury Transmit (I have this checked, but don’t have any of my video devices checked, as I like to preview my projects within their comp windows on one display, and keep my various control windows on my second display).