AfterEffects

Work with the media cache

When After Effects imports video and audio in some formats, it processes and caches versions of these items that it can readily access when generating previews. Imported audio files are each conformed to a new .cfa file, and MPEG files are indexed to a new .mpgindex file. This greatly improves performance for previews, because the video and audio items do not need to be reprocessed for each preview.

Note: When you first import a file, you may experience a slight delay while the media is being processed and cached.

A database retains links to each of the cached media files. This media cache database is shared with Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Encore, and Adobe Soundbooth, so each of these applications can each read to and write from the same set of cached media files. If you change the location of the database from within any of these applications, the location is updated for the other applications, too. Each application can use its own cache folder, but the same database keeps track of them all.

 Choose Edit > Preferences > Memory & Cache (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Memory & Cache (Mac OS), and do one of the following:

  • Click one of the Choose Folder buttons to change the location of the media cache database or the media cache itself.

  • Click Clean to remove conformed and indexed files from the cache and to remove their entries from the database. This only affects footage items for which the source file is no longer available.