Playback
Pressing the spacebar plays from your currently selected panel. You may notice playback is sluggish on first viewing, but faster on subsequent views. This is because on playback, After Effects calculates what your frames look like, and stores that information in your computer’s RAM, or random access memory. The next time you play that section, After Effects can recall what those frames look like, and display them much faster. If a frame is stored in RAM, you’ll see a green bar above it in the timeline.
This is all to say that After Effects is a resource-intensive piece of software, and the more RAM your machine has, the more frames can be stored in RAM, and the more responsive the software will be. Don’t forget about the various tips ...
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