AE slowing down on continuous project

[Callum25178930w43f]

Hey everyone, 

I'm a video editor, I've been using AE for a little over 10 years. I've got a client now where I'm producing YouTube videos every week and they require some custom animations, rotoscoping, graphics, etc. 

Over time, the project file is slowing down more and more. Here's more specifications

• Editing on a 2023 macbook pro M2 
• Adobe is up to date
• I clean the cache daily 
• After a couple videos I would duplicate the AE project, and in the new project I unlink the old original footage 
• I'm using a few different AE templates inside this project (animation projects from Envato)

I'm wondering what the best practices are for this kind of work as I'll be continuing to crank these videos out weekly and I want to keep the machine running as fast as possible. 

Any tips? Thanks!

[ToolfarmJP]

If your extra fast SSD is inside your PC, you set it as a cache disk. This setting would make your operation faster.

[Andrew Yoole]

What kind of rotoscoping?  Are you using Rotobrush?  Rotobrush can be quite resource hungry.  Delete old rotobrush comps wherever possible.  

Sounds to me like the project is just getting too big and cumbersome.  Template files are often built quite large to make them better structured for changes, at the cost of resource efficiency.  You've combined several templates, so the file size might be huge,  

How big is your project file on the disk?  And how big was the original version in comparison?  Anything more than 15-20 Mb would be ringing alarm bells for me.

[Callum25178930w43f]

Yep I'm using Rotobrush. Good call on deleting those comps i'll try that next. Yeah the last AE project was 180mb so this would explain why things have been going so slow/constantly running out of memory. I was needing to clear the cache every 5 minutes just to avoid black frames entering compositions. When it comes to animation templates do you recommend just not using them altogether? 

[Andrew Yoole]

When it comes to animation templates do you recommend just not using them altogether? 

y @Callum25178930w43f

Not at all, templates are a great resource.  But just be conscious of their size and what they contain.   If you're using a  template that has 3 scenes you like and 7 you don't, use the File > Dependencies tool to get rid of the template content you don't need.  Once you know what you need, of course.