How To Clear Cache After Effects

After Effects’ disk caching system is something I really appreciate when working on large complex projects. While most of the magic is done behind the scenes, it still plays an important role in the After Effects workflow, saving a lot of preview and render time. When I think of the word cache, as some of you 3D may know, I think of heaps of large files placed somewhere. When doing 3D simulations such as smoke or liquid simulation, you are always working with buffers so it is difficult to forget them. Since After Effects does the caching in the background, I find that many users sometimes forget that everything is piling up behind the scenes. For those of you who may not be familiar with After Effects’ disk caching, let me briefly explain how it works: Read: how to clear cache after effects Read more: Zante (Zakynthos) Basic When you process and render frames (such as with a RAM preview), After Effects tries to save those frames and information to your disk. That way, After Effects will be able to call up and reuse that information if needed a lot faster. So if you make a change and want to revert back to your original changes, After Effects won’t have to recalculate everything but simply reuse the information from the cache. If you’re using AE CS6+, you get a global performance buffer and a persistent drive cache that will save you more time in intelligently rendering. As I said before, sometimes these caches are so large that we don’t even notice. To clean your disk cache, go to your After Effects Preferences, go to Media & Disk Cache, then hit Empty Disk Cache. Some people have reported that this does not necessarily delete files from their drive and this could be for a multitude of reasons such as whether you are still using cached files, etc. you can also clear your cache manually by going to the folder and simply deleting the files. Believe it or not, some people have more than 100GB of cache folders on their disks, some may not need them anymore. Since there’s currently no way to automatically clean the cache (for good reasons), you’ll have to do it yourself. Read more: how to use the router as a wireless adapter as an SSD with plenty of storage space. If possible, use a separate drive from your location to take advantage of the throughput of the drives. The faster the drives, the faster AE can write to those drives. If you are limited on space, try reducing the Maximum Disk Cache Size to an appropriate amount. Let me know below! If this article helped you, please share it with others. Read more: how to make princess sofia cake