Why does AE still playback from RAM?

[chrisbrearley]

I get that 20 years ago hard drives weren't the quickest and there was a limited choice in codecs so it made sense to playback from RAM. But now we all have SSDs and DNxHR exists I don't get why AE has not been re-written to playback straight from a hard drive rather than shovelling it into RAM first. Uncompressed I gather would be a strain on most systems but this is overkill anyway, certainly for playback - I challenge anyone to point out any differences between uncompressed and DNxHR HQ and if people wanted to keep working uncompressed then the option could always be there to playback from RAM but for me and I would assume many others 10bit DNx would be fine. A choice like in Resolve would be ideal.

I get a bit sick of running out of RAM on a longtime or having to suffer stuttering playback even when everything is cached as AE is busy putting disk cache into RAM for stuff further up the timeline.

If Adobe pulled their finger out even slightly then AE could be a finishing system to rival Flame/Smoke/NUKE studio. Add in a non-linear timeline that we can drop our comps into with disk playback and hey presto it's done.

[Szalam · Accepted solution]

I think this sort of thing would be a very useful feature request. I mean, I'd suggest you word it differently rather than something about them pulling their fingers out from unknown locations

Anyway, I don't know the actual answer to your question about why it hasn't be adapted to work that way, but you can let them actually hear you by filing a feature request here: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911311-after-effects

Please be as specific as you can about what you would like to see and why. And, again, try to do it nicely. It's one thing here in the user-to-user forums where we all need to rant a bit from time to time, but when you're sending something straight to the team, remember that the AE team are people too.

[chrisbrearley]

Thanks, how long has that forum existed? Never seen it before.

[Szalam]

It's relatively new.

Before, you'd send off a feature request and it would kinda go into a black hole as far as we the users could tell. Now, I've met the person at Adobe on the AE team whose job it was to read those feature requests and file them, so I know that it wasn't a black hole, but that didn't really help anybody else. Now, you can see what other users have filed, vote on it, add comments, etc. and sometimes the Adobe team can ask for clarification or give feedback. Now, obviously, they don't respond to everything publicly, but overall I do find this thing much better than the old way.

[chrisbrearley]

Absolutely this is better, thanks for pointing it out.