After effects is so slow, impossible to preview, and it uses 90% of computers memory!

[Shidokht311833102riz]

Hi, I have a major problem with after effects. It is working really slow! Render previews are almost impossible, even when i hide a layer it takes ten seconds to show me the result in preview! each time i move the time indicator I have to wait at least 10 seconds to see the resaults.  It's frustrating to work with! Also the minute i start after effects it uses 90% of my memory even before I open any projects!!

The resoloution in both comp window and Preview window is on quarter. All other softwares are closed. The project and it's files are on a SSD drive with 319GB free space, my cash folder is on another SSD drive with 180GB free space and after effects is installed on my c drive wich is also SSD and has 138GB free space.

I am currently working with After effects 2023 and these are my ASUS laptop configurations:

Processor 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12700H 2.30 GHz
Installed RAM 16.0 GB (15.6 GB usable)
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

i also share some scrronshots. Can some one please tell me what should i do?

 

[David Arbor]

16 GB of RAM is not that much for After Effects. Even with a fast SSD for cache, all frames are still rendered to RAM first. You're using a lot of PNG sequences, and AE is notoriously slow with playing those back. I would instead use OpenEXR. You can get very small file sizes if you use DWAA or DWAB compression, I often get smaller file sizes and better performance with this format than I do with PNG.

[Shidokht311833102riz]

Thank you for your answer. Actualy the project was given to me pre-composed, I didn't have a role in choosing the render format of the 2D animates before they get to compositing. What should I do in such a case?

Also I don't think PNG sequences are the main problem because just last week I had a light motion graphic project with no PNG sequences and no 3D layers but I still had a tough time previewing even one frame of it! Here is a picture from this project layers: 

[David Arbor]

Performance is determined by so many things, and your comps might just be too heavy. Do you see the little snail icon at the bottom-left of your Timeline? That's the Composition Profiler, and it's pretty cool. Read through this article to understand how to properly use it, but this tool is a great way to find bottlenecks in your comp: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/composition-profiler.html

[Shidokht311833102riz]

Cool, I didn't know that existed!