Low Memory warning in After Effects 23.4 when using scenes imported from Character Animator

[Dane248914394gd4]

I'm using After Effects 23.4 on an M1 Mac Studio with 128GB of ram (macOS 13.3.1).

I've noticed that I consistently get low memory warning messages and struggle to playback more than a few frames of compositions when working with scenes imported from Character Animator (v23.1). It's something that becomes increasingly worse, the more imports from Character Animator I do.

Also, when rendering out compositions that contain Charater Animator scenes, After Effects is only using 1% of the 128GB of RAM available. By contrast, when I render out compositions from projects that DO NOT contain Character Animator scenes, After Effects uses around 73% of the 128GB of RAM available.

I'm not sure what the reason is for this?

[vivkum]

Unlike Dynamic link between AE and Premiere where multiple dynamically linked items go through the same headless instance of AE and Premiere, each CH scene import spins up a new CH headless instance.

The side effect of this is that the memory allocated to all Adobe apps gets divided between the many CH instances and the one AE instance (See snapshot for details).
If you had 58GB assigned as "RAM available for" all adobe apps then that 58GB will get divided equally among all these instances. Note that the preference is not AE specific but is a cumulative preference for all listed apps.

As such, each new CH scene import shrinks the Max allowed memory for AE.
Unfortunately this issue with CH imports in AE is a known issue and something we want to fix but for now it is expected behavior. We will keep an eye out on further such reports and prioritize accordingly.

[Dane248914394gd4]

Thanks for the reply. Is there anything I can do to maximise the performance in these instances? I guess exporting CH scenes as PNG sequences would help, but what about the way the RAM is allocated in AE? Is there anything in particular I should be doing there?

[vivkum]

Importing media that does not need to be dynamically linked would solve the issue. Once you have switched over your project to using media that does not need to be dynamically linked, please confirm using "Memory Details" dialog (snapshot in previous post) that you don't have unnecessary/multiple apps listed there, consequently the "Max Allowed Memory" for AE will be a significant chunk of "RAM avilable for" all adobe apps. Please let us know if you still see the "low memory" warning post that and I can look at it with priority.