How to get from 8gb to 16gb of Memory

[Phoebe21995445odsb]

Okay so I am NOT at all a techincal person, I downloarded after effects yesterday for a project I am working on in school. When I look at my memory intsalled for this app its at 8gb, I have cleared caches and changed RAM allocated to other apps and its still not enough. I want to have 16 gb of memory but I don't know how to do that. I have Mac ios Catolina 10.15, which doesnt allow the user to manually allocate RAM to applications. I currently have 40GB of free storage on my laptop so I have plenty to spare for this program. I keep getting the "after effects error: cached preview needs 2 or more frames to play back" and its really annoying. I feel like there is probably an obvious anwser to this question but I have no clye

[Andrew Yoole · Accepted solution]

When you say you have "40GB of free storage", do you mean you have 40GB of RAM?  Or 40GB free on your hard drive?  It's not the same thing.

Go to "About this Mac", and on the overview page it'll say how much memory (RAM) you have.

You can adjust how much RAM is available to After Effects in After Effects Preferences.  Reduce the amount available for other applications and the amount available to AE will increase, but your overall system may become unstable if you starve it of too much memory.

 

[Phoebe21995445odsb]

Ohhh okay I get the difference between the two. Thank you for the help, unfortnately I have a macbook air that only allows for 8GB RAM with no upgrades so thats probably why its so laggy

[OussK]

To fix the issue of "cached preview needs 2 or more frames to playback" try to reduce the preview quality to quarter and keep some frames if necessary, anyway 8GB are too low for AE