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28

Improved Caching for Longer Playback: A New Era of Composition Playback in After Effects

Adobe Employee ,
Jan 15, 2025 Jan 15, 2025

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Exciting news for After Effects users! Say goodbye to RAM limitations and hello to smoother, longer playback! 

 

We are thrilled to announce that Improved Caching for Longer Playback is now available for After Effects Beta users beginning in version 25.2.0.079. Gone are the days where you need to buff up your system with massive amounts of RAM to preview your comp. This exciting update transforms how playback works in After Effects, moving beyond the constraints of RAM Preview to a more efficient disk-based system. 

 

What’s New 

Improved Caching for Longer Playback enables you to render and play back your entire composition without being constrained by RAM allocation. By utilizing the disk cache more efficiently, After Effects can now: 

  • Deliver longer playback durations 
  • Improve performance especially on systems with lower specifications 

 

Why Does it Matter to You 

Previously, After Effects would stop rendering when memory was exhausted, resulting in partial composition playback. Now, with Improved Caching for Longer Playback: 

  • After Effects will render entire compositions without RAM size constraints (4K? 60fps? You no longer need to render partial work areas!) 
  • RAM is used more efficiently to render individual frames 
  • The system dynamically cycles between disk and memory as needed

 

             Avi_AE_0-1736975534670.png

 

Getting Started 

Improved Caching for Longer Playback is activated by default from version 25.2.0.079 of After Effects Beta. No additional setup is required to start experiencing the benefits. 

 

If you need to disable Improved Caching for Longer Playback, please go to “Preferences” -> “Media & Disk Cache” -> “Advanced Options” -> Uncheck “Enable Preview from Disk Cache” 

 

We Want Your Feedback 

Test this feature with your projects and let us know: 

  • How does the playback duration compare to your previous experience? 
  • Are you noticing smoother preview/playback experiences? 
  • The cache bar (the blue and green bar under your composition) behaves differently than before: is it distracting? Is it confusing? 
  • Have you encountered any specific challenges or limitations? 

 

Share Your Experience - Leave a comment with the following information: 

  • Your hardware specifications:  
  • Total system memory (GB) 
  • RAM available for AE (GB) 
  • Maximum Disk Cache Size in AE Preferences (GB)  
  • Available disk space (GB) 
  • Type/make of disk 
  • Your experience with Improved Caching for Longer Playback 

 

If you detect any problems with quality, submit your projects 

  • Open your After Effects project 
  • Go to File -> Dependencies -> Collect Files 
  • Choose Collect -> Save As (Name Your Folder) 
  • After Effects will compile your .aep file, footage, and a text report 
  • Zip the folder and share the link with us in the comment section below (your projects will remain confidential and will be used for testing purposes only!) 

 

Known Issues and Feature Limitations 

The disk cache size and speed are limiting factors. The disk size limits preview duration. The disk speed limits the bitrate (frame size / FPS / bit-depth) of what can be previewed in real-time. 

 

Looking Ahead 

This is just the beginning of our journey to transform the way After Effects handles playback. Beta testing of Improved Caching for Longer Playback will last a little longer than some of our other features because it fundamentally changes how preview works on After Effects and we want to get it right! 

 

Internally, we have been testing a representative sample of projects with a suite of hardware configurations, and we are excited to finally put this feature in your hands and get your feedback. Test your unique projects on your hardware so we can ensure that our performance updates benefit all customers and meet quality metrics before launch. 

 

Your feedback during this beta phase is crucial in helping us refine and perfect this feature before its official release. We are excited to see how Improved Caching for Longer Playback enhances your creative workflow and look forward to your valuable feedback! 

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Explorer ,
Jan 15, 2025 Jan 15, 2025

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This is a good step forward however - maybe just improve performance instead of constantly pumping new features in would be great. Stability has been on the backburner to "advancement" in recent years IMHO.

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New Here ,
Jan 15, 2025 Jan 15, 2025

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In what world would this not be considered a performance improvement? Probably one of the biggest performance improvements in years at that. 

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 23, 2025 Jan 23, 2025

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I would prefer stability over features.

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Explorer ,
Jan 27, 2025 Jan 27, 2025

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LATEST

After Effects is pretty damn stable, and this feature is HUGE. 

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Explorer ,
Jan 15, 2025 Jan 15, 2025

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First impressions: I am actually impressed!!! 

 

One of the most annoying "bugs" plaguing me personally was the ram preview limitation. Sometimes AE would only preview a couple of frames when it should preview way more, and it would say out of memory when it's not. I would then have to clear all cache and memory and then it would start previewing normally. This new feature fixes that. Basically, my disk cache size is now the actual preview limit. 

 

So far I noticed 3 bugs: 
1. Making any adjustments to a layer that is shorter than the timeline removes the blue and green cache bar. Good thing it's only visual by the looks of it, the frames are still cached but just the bar is cleared.
2. Same thing happens in nested compositions. If I cache entire comp, going into parent comp the frames are still cached but timeline doesn't show it. 
3. When "Cache Before Playback" is checked, even if the entire timeline is cached to disk, preview still has to do a full sweep of "caching" it to RAM, even though all frames are cached and playback should start.

But other than that I did some testing and it's pretty interesting. I use 500gb disk cache. I limited AE to only 1gb of RAM and it just kept previewing and caching to disk. And going back to cached frames it would play without an issue. So now with this, it will potentially be more important to have a nice dedicated cache disk than something like 128gb of ram.

 

As for my specs:

CPU: AMD 7950x
RAM: 64GB 5600mhz
OS disk: Samsung 980 Pro 1 TB NVMe
Cache disk: Samsung 980 Pro 1TB NVMe (Cache limited to 500gb)
Project disk: 8TB Samsung 970 SSD

GPU: RTX 4090

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Adobe Employee ,
Jan 15, 2025 Jan 15, 2025

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Hello @1suky1! Glad to know that you see the benefits of Improved Caching already.

These are very interesting observations. Thank you so much for sharing. We are looking into this behaviour and trying to reproduce at our end. We will keep you updated / reach out for further questions! 🙂

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New Here ,
Jan 15, 2025 Jan 15, 2025

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Sounds awesome
Is it just for windows so far?
Can't see this on mac

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Adobe Employee ,
Jan 15, 2025 Jan 15, 2025

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It is available on both Windows and Mac. Update your After Effects Beta app on Creative Cloud Desktop to the latest version (25.2.0.079). Improved Caching should be activated by default in this version.

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New Here ,
Jan 15, 2025 Jan 15, 2025

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Just re-installed.

oleksandr_4746_0-1736989293889.png

 

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Adobe Employee ,
Jan 15, 2025 Jan 15, 2025

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Try clicking the "Check for updates" icon on the top right corner. If it still doesn't show build 79, then it is very surprising. Which country are you based in?

Screenshot 2025-01-15 at 5.04.26 PM.png

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Community Expert ,
Jan 15, 2025 Jan 15, 2025

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Perforance improvements are always welcome.  Thank you.

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Community Expert ,
Jan 17, 2025 Jan 17, 2025

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Perfect!

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New Here ,
Jan 17, 2025 Jan 17, 2025

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I just tried this and must say its game changer as i was able to preview entire(45 sec) 4k timeline which was not possible earlier, thanks AE team!

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Participant ,
Jan 20, 2025 Jan 20, 2025

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I'm gathering hardware to uptate my workstation and opted for 192 GB of RAM and a 1 TB gen4 nvme cache drive.

 

This new functionality has be thinking that I need to lower my total RAM (with the memory speed gains that come along with that on Windows based systems) and opting for a larger cache drive.

 

Thoughts?

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 20, 2025 Jan 20, 2025

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Same question, just bought all the equipment to build a new workstation.

Is the hierarchy still RAM > cache space for timeline efficiency?

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Participant ,
Jan 21, 2025 Jan 21, 2025

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RAM is anywhere from like 10-100× faster than even the fastest Thunderbolt-connected storage, so if money is no issue, go for the extra ram. But with this new change, you could buy a 1TB nvme drive for “ram cache” for under $100, which is far more RAM than most systems could fit.

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Explorer ,
Jan 21, 2025 Jan 21, 2025

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16tb RAID over nvme PCIe 5.0 is what I intend to do. Data transfers of up to 512Gbps.

 

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Explorer ,
Jan 22, 2025 Jan 22, 2025

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The way it used to work: You have 128gb of ram and that was the max AE could use and fit as many frames as possible. Disk cache was used only for "saving" those cached frames, but at any point you could only preview 128gb worth of frames. Once you filled it up, preview would stop and you would have to change your in/out region if you wanted to preview another part of comp.

How it works now: Your disk cache dictates how much you can preview. AE will keep previewing and caching as long as there's cache space. RAM preview frames will be automatically swapped between disk cache and ram preview. So AE will still fill up 128gb but you will keep previewing, it won't stop now. 

 

So yes, that means that you don't really need 192GB of RAM. Don't now what kind of work you do but 64-128 should be more than enough even for 4K comps. Because even if it can only fit 1 frame into ram preview, it will keep caching and previewing until your disk cache fills up. I did a test, limited AE to only 1GB of RAM and it kept previewing. Was a bit slower and wouldn't recommend it but it worked fine.

 

Now, for faster memory speed, I can't tell if there will be any difference in AE. Because let's face it, if your comp is simple it will fill up fast no matter what, and if it's slow you're more at the mercy of actual render speed than anything else. 

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Community Expert ,
Jan 22, 2025 Jan 22, 2025

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@Graham Hutchins 

 

If you work with Ae, Ps, Ai, Pr, Media Encoder, and/or  C4D at the same time. I'd stick with the 192GB of RAM and swap the 1TB NVMe for 4TB.

 

 

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New Here ,
Jan 21, 2025 Jan 21, 2025

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improvements in years

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 23, 2025 Jan 23, 2025

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While I think this is cool -- and I do love a great feature, especially when it involves performance -- I am a bit perturbed. I just bought a system (plus I have a system for work), both with 1TB of storage, which is for applications (and basically acts as a downloads folder). I usually have about 400-600GB of space left on average, depending on the workload. I work hybrid/remotely, so I have both a MacBook Pro (M3 Max) for work and a Mac Mini (M4 Pro) for home, and run my projects and store my files on externals. Until recently, I was using a Thunderbolt 3 external drive that ran at ~1800MB/s read and write (which was fine -- no issues), and just graduated to a Thunderbolt 4 external drive that runs at ~3000 read and write speeds. While I know that isn't close to internal speeds (my MBP and MM both have internal speeds of ~5000+ read and write), I do understand for this feature to really work, you need fast storage.

 

I have always bought my systems with a tonne of RAM (as much as I could afford) as I knew Ae (my professional tool) would eat as much RAM as it could. Now with this caching feature, and RAM not being as much a priority, and me only having a pool of roughly 500GB of storage available, I am concerned that my system will run out of space, especially on Apple Silicon that already uses swap. 

 

A few questions:

  • What is the minimum cache size you recommend?
  • If this feature becomes stock, will I still be able to uncheck “Enable Preview from Disk Cache?" (so I can prioritize RAM over cache for previews)?
  • What should the minimum speed of an external storage drive be?
  • What does this mean for the next system I will eventually get? (ie: "you should priortize a good balance of RAM and storage...")

 

MacBook Pro M3 Max: 

  • Total system memory (GB): 96GB
  • RAM available for AE (GB): 72GB
  • Maximum Disk Cache Size in AE Preferences (GB): (TB4 external 1TB partition) 900GB
  • Available disk space (GB): (currently) 700GB
  • Type/make of disk: Orico ‎O7000-2TB, NVMe SSD PCIe M.2 SSD 2280 PCIe 4.0X4 in a HyperDrive Next Portable 40Gbps USB4 M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure
  • Your experience with Improved Caching for Longer Playback: N/A (still in testing)

 

Mac Mini M4 Pro: 

  • Total system memory (GB): 64GB
  • RAM available for AE (GB): 52GB
  • Maximum Disk Cache Size in AE Preferences (GB): (TB4 external 1TB partition) 900GB
  • Available disk space (GB): (currently) 750GB
  • Type/make of disk: Orico ‎O7000-2TB, NVMe SSD PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD 2280 PCIe 4.0X4 in a HyperDrive Next Portable 40Gbps USB4 M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure
  • Your experience with Improved Caching for Longer Playback: N/A (still in testing)

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Participant ,
Jan 24, 2025 Jan 24, 2025

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RE: “What should the minimum speed of an external storage drive be?
 
If we can assume AE is caching frames more-or-less as uncompressed video, judging by Avi_AE’s post: (my underline emphasis added)
 

Known Issues and Feature Limitations

The disk cache size and speed are limiting factors. The disk size limits preview duration. The disk speed limits the bitrate (frame size / FPS / bit-depth) of what can be previewed in real-time.

 
Then we can calculate the needed speed for realtime playback using an uncompressed video bitrate calculator, like this one. UHD (3840×2160) using 16bpc at 30.0 fps is about 1,898 MB/s. Even with, being generous, +20% overhead (~2,200 MB/s), that’s within your external drive’s ~3,000 MB/s speed. And if you’re working in 1080p comps (~475 MB/s), you have plenty of bandwidth to spare.
 
If you’re working in extremely large comp sizes and/or have a slower drive, we can hope that AE previews just like it does now, just using RAM (perhaps like the existing low memory/expression error message banners?). If AE isn’t smart enough to detect that it can’t maintain realtime playback consistently, let’s hope the new “Enable Preview from Disk Cache” setting remains (I would assume so? I can’t remember the last time a new preference toggle added in a beta was removed in the stable release).

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Community Beginner ,
Jan 24, 2025 Jan 24, 2025

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Right on, excellent. I'm hoping for the best possible outcomes. Thanks for your input, @sskaz

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