What's wrong with After Effects?

Report · Jun 15, 2025

Most of the time, I just generate videos for my music using a saved template file where I replace the image and the audio. However, today, right after opening the project, After 2–3 clicks, it popped up saying that the memory was full.

I really like the program, but I'm starting to worry that there might not be a laptop on the market with the performance and quality that meets the requirements and allows for dynamic work.

Currently, I'm using an Asus ROG Strix Scar G18 2024 laptop with the following specs:

Intel i9 14900HX (24 cores)
64GB DDR5 5200MHz RAM
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU (16GB)
WD Black 2TB NVMe SSD

I've had issues even before this. Unfortunately, no matter how small the project is, real-time rendering doesn’t really work — even if I set the preview quality to the lowest and reduce the resolution to 1.5%.

I’m only using one external plugin, which is Red Giant Trapcode, since I make visualizers for music.

What could be the problem?

Report · Jun 15, 2025

What project settings and Comp settings are you working at? I would expect your hardware to handle 1080p24 or 1080p30 at 8-bpc really well with it slowing down a bit for either 2160p or 16-bpc.

It would help to have the exact error message. With some error messages, we can copy and paste the text in the message. Or a screenshot will help.

Taking a guess, you probably need to free up drive space for the Media Disk Cache. With a 2TB C drive, the default amount should be around 200GB, but if you're also using that storage media as your boot drive and scratch disk and for applications and documents, it can fill up fast.

It will probably help to review tis as well:

After Effects User Guide > Memory, Storage, and Performance > Memory and Storage.