secret after effects settings

it sounds like a tip for a video game, but after effects cs3 has secret levels settings. they can even be so important for your project that you don’t understand why adobe hid them. in my case, i had severe troubles rendering a 3 minutes short (on my vista sp1 laptop with 2gb of ram), because after effects constantly told me that it is running out of memory… it felt like the software was piling up all the rendered images into ram and released it when the render is finished. to get around this problem, hold the shift key, go to edit > preferences > memory & cache and you’ll be surprised to see a new entry in the drop down menu called ‘secret’: the most interesting setting is the one that you can clear the memory after a specific amount of rendered images: ‘disable layer cache’. i put in 15 and i finally could render my short without any problems.