Empty your disk cache to clear hard drive space

Hey in this video were going to look at disk cache and clearing out some space in your hard drive. Like I said in the previous video, I've got very little hard drive space left, if you look down here I've got 25 GB of hard drive space available of my 225. So I didn’t have very much to start with and I've run it all out. So I live on this edge of having to clean stuff out, now what happens on this edge of having to clean stuff out all the time. Now what happens in after effects when its previewing is its storing all those previews somewhere and it holds onto them, when you close the program it doesn’t get rid of them. So it just means that you’ve got this huge amount of file space that’s been taken up, if you open after effects and use it for a day or two then don’t open it for 6 months, it still stored those giant files. And they are massive. We looked in the earlier video, if I go to after effects preferences, if you're on a pc you have to go to edit down to preferences but on a mac and were going to go to disk cache, I've told it to steal 10, I cant remember off the top of my head by default I think its 30GB, you’ve got 30GB that its storing in there and it doesn’t get rid of them but what you can do is just do this, click disk cache, see I've got 7.3 in there. That’s what its used just in doing these tutorials for you today. Click okay.

Alright, so you can do that. Just incase you are doing it as well, premier which is a program people often use with and in conjunction with after effects, premieres your editing program, after effects is more your special effects and titles. So premiere if you're doing that, that actually sucks up even more, go into the preferences in there and find media and disk cache and clear that one as well and you can save another 30GB with the space and you might turn it down just so it doesn’t steal as much like I have to but the higher it is, the more previews, the faster it runs the more previews it doesn’t have to redo. So if you’ve got a huge amount of file size, you’ve got a couple of terabytes left over then crank it up and you can have lots of good previews.

Just before we go as well is there's one in here called auto save. This one here is set to every 20 minutes. If your machine is crappy and dying you might even turn it down to every 5 minutes. It does pause it for a second to do a little preview but it means if it crashes and its crashing quite often, it means its more likely to go, it has an auto save but you might want to turn it up instead of 20 minutes its every 5. But if you're finding its getting, it will flash for a minute saying its auto saving and that might be annoying so you can turn that down.

Alright that’s how to clear your disk cache and play around with your auto save.