After effects rendering issues

[mnunez@cccollege.edu]

Why does after effects only use 5% of my 64 gigs of available ram when rendering?

Is there a setting I need to address? Can someone help?

[Mylenium]

There is nothing to set. AE takes what it needs, sometimes almost all your system RAM, sometimes barely any. Entirely depends on the contents of the project, actual render settings and so on. Anything outside that is an Internet myth. No, you can't coerce AE to use more memory, all cores of your processor or whatever nor would it magically make rendering faster.

Mylenium

[mnunez@cccollege.edu]

Mylenium

So no way around it? Thanks for that.

[Warren Heaton]

It's about having sufficient RAM in After Effects.  If your current frame size and color depth only call for, let's say, 2GB of RAM, then you just need at least 2GB of RAM.  If you'd like to force more RAM to be used, you could increase the frame size or the color depth.  You'll find that just going from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160 will change the RAM required per 8bpc frame from 7.8MB to 31.6MB.  Of course, that doesn't factor in anything else AE is doing, but once you have enough RAM well... then you have enough RAM.  

Another way to look at it is like a fixed amount of water flowing through a pipe.  If you only need a 2-inch diameter pipe for the amount of water you're sending through, then having a 64-inch diameter pipe won't cause more water to go through the pipe (as much as you might want to force it to happen).

Of course, with more RAM you get longer Previews and can run more applications at the same time.

If you were hoping for faster performance with more RAM in AE, what you need in that case is faster processors.