After Effects Secret Menu

in After Effects Tutorial on October 28, 2019

Did you know that After Effects has a ‘secret menu’? 

After Effects Secret Menu 1

How to Access the After Effects Secret Menu

It’s a preference menu and you can find it in the preference window of After Effects. To get to this top most secret menu you need to hold down “Shift” key and go to “Edit>Preference>General” Now check, your preference window got a new menu “Secret”.

1- Disable Layer Cache

easy, right? At least once you know it.  and Now What does the After Effects Secret Menu do?.

After Effects normally cache every layer and frames whenever you RAM preview. This speed up your After Effects workflow. By caching layer information and frames After Effects stores all the layer and animation information of your work in the RAM so next time when you change some layers or frames it just has to render those layers only.

2- Purge Every ‘0’ Frames During Make Movie

Purging is the process of emptying your memory cache. By purging your RAM you will free up space for After Effects to do more rendering. so this option comes handy. And this is the most useful option in this secret menu. Every time After Effects renders a frame, it cach these frame in RAM. So if you have layered heavy composition, RAM feels up and throws the error.

To avoid that error, you can move your setting to 5, After Effects will empty the memory cache every time 5 frames are rendered. and in some situation you reach 1 

3. Ignore Sequence Rendering Errors

This is the least useful option and most dangerous option in this menu, As the name implies, when you have the ‘Ignore Sequence Rendering Errors’ box checked After Effects will disregard errors during the rendering process. This can be helpful in some instances, but it’s generally not a great idea to have this box checked. and Probably this is why Adobe kept this option secret.

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