How To Clear Disk Cache After Effects

Have you ever experienced a massive decrement of the free space in your Hard Disk Drive (HDD) or the Solid State Drive (SSD) while using adobe after effects? Also, you might have seen a warning dialog box in after effects, which is saying that "Your disk cache folder is on a drive that does not have enough available space…"

After Effects Disk Cache — *Warning message dialog box*

The reason for this issue is After Effects automatically saves some of the information on the project in a disk cache folder. It may help to increase performance and reduce the complexity of the project. In this article, you will learn what is after effects disk cache, the importance of having a disk caching system, how to change the location and the size of the After Effects disk cache folder and how to clean after effects cache correctly.

What is After Effects Disk Cache?
Importance of the After Effects Caching System
After Effects Cache Location – How to Change it and the Size
Clear After Effects Disk Cache

What is After Effects Disk Cache?

Caching mechanism is a vast topic that we can discuss in computer architecture. But simply saying, this is a technique which is used to access data between Random Access Memory (RAM) and HDD, where the currently using data in the RAM and the disk cache hold the data which has been recently read by the RAM. It can be used to have a high-speed data read/ write rate. The same technique has been used in After Effects to increase the performance of the software. As we know, the size of the RAM is a significant factor to improve the performance in After Effects because video decoding can be quickly done in a large pool of RAM. That is why many of Adobe softwares are always creating a RAM pool from the main memory once it opened. We will discuss more about RAM in After Effects in future articles. After exceeding the limit of the created RAM pool, it will try to increase the size by using the disk cache.

I am sure that you are already familiar with After Effect RAM preview method, which gives a preview of what we have designed so far. For example, let's consider we have 60 seconds of an animated project. After running a RAM preview, we can able to see a preview of the outcome in real time. Also, this process might take a while to save the information in RAM and a particular cache folder. After the RAM preview completes, that specific animated sequence will become a virtually reusable sequence. You will notice some green color and blue color bars in your timeline where green colored portions are saved in the RAM and blue colored portions are saved in the disk cache. If you are working on a complex project, you might have seen this blue colored bars which already cached into the disk drive. This is how the size of the cache folder increases and decreases the space on your hard drive. By default, the After Effects disk cache folder is located in your system drive.

Above is a very brief introduction only to have a basic idea of how disk cache works in After Effects. If you need to learn deeply about how it works, there are some references mentioned below.

After Effects User Guide – Adobe Support

Importance of the After Effects Caching System

Now you have a basic idea about what is After Effects and how the free space of HDD or SSD becomes low while using After Effects. But this is not a strange or harmful thing to your system, because it is a method that used to improve the performance of the software and hardware. It will really help when you work on large and complex editing projects, such as 3D rendering, motion tracking, color grading. If you specify a large amount of space for your After Effects cache folder, you can save tons of your time that you are wasting to render the same frames again and again. You will also learn how to change the size of After Effects disk cache in this article.

Furthermore, if you have to make some changes to the existing frames, it can be done quickly because After Effects quickly go through the cache information and apply those changes only to the required frames instead of rendering the whole sequence. It will save the time of rendering frames again and again. Also, increasing the cache size can be considered as one of the performance hacks. We will also discuss how to improve the performance in After Effects in a different article. You can also use the comment section to share your thoughts.

After Effects Cache Location – How to Change it and the Size

Now let's see how to change the disk cache location in After Effects, what are the recommended size of the cache folder and how to change it. There are few things to know before doing the changes to the cache folder.

Select a suitable drive to locate the cache folder

The main factor is to choose the fastest drive on your computer. For example, if you have one Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and one Solid State Drive (SSD), the best option is selecting the SSD as your drive to locate the cache folder. Since an SSD has a high-speed data rate, it will help to transfer the cache information between RAM and your disk drive with low latency.

Decide a suitable size for the cache folder

As the next step, you should have an idea of how much size you are going to reserve. According to Adobe, they said that the default size of the cache folder is set to 10% from the total drive size. For example, if you have 256GB of HDD or SSD, the default cache volume will be around 25GB. So it is recommended to keep at least the given default value, or you can increase a bit as you need.

Note: Do not increase the size as much as close to your HDD or SSD's total volume. It may be an issue for your system's performance, and it is not recommended. But you can play around the default value and experience the changes.

Now let's see how to change the After Effects cache location and the size of it. You can simply follow the following steps to change the location of the cache folder.

Go to Edit > Preferences > Media & Disk Cache (In Windows) or go to After Effects > Preferences > Media & Disk Cache (In Mac OS)
Then click on Choose Folder button in Windows or Choose button in Mac OS and you can specify any location.
To change the size of the disk cache, you can click on the number and type the volume you want.

Clear After Effects Disk Cache

Now let's see how to clean After Effects disk cache and when to clear it. Usually, after completing one of your projects, you can perform a cleanup. It will help to save the space on your drive, and it will also help you when you start a new project. But remember that it will clear all cache information of your all the projects so far once you clear the cache. It will not be harmful to your project data. But you may have to spend a while on seeing a RAM preview because there is no any cache information to recover the frames of your project quickly. That is why I recommend you to clear the cache once complete your project, and it will be more efficient for you. But if you have low disk space and the keep receiving the warning message mentioned at the beginning of the article, you can clear the cache by yourself, and it will not harm for your project. You can follow the following step to perform the cleanup process.

Go to Edit > Preferences > Media & Disk Cache (In Windows) or go to After Effects > Preferences > Media & Disk Cache (In Mac OS) and click on Empty Disk Cache button.

Hope that you have learnt about what is disk cache, how it occurs and how to work with it in After Effects to have excellent performance. Please feel free to ask if you have any questions regarding this, and anything to know about After Effects. Also, don't forget to share your experiences with caching in After Effects. It may help someone to overcome their issues with your experiences. If you are interested in video editing, motion graphics, After Effects/ Premiere Pro tutorials/ tips, please stay tuned with us, and you can lean many of things in future.