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After Effects CS4 projects can be saved as .aepx fi les. These
are identical to use, but are written in plain Unicode text;
you can edit them with an ordinary text editor. Most of
what is in these fi les is untouchable, but a few strings, such
as source fi le locations, are easily recognizable.
This feature was added for one reason only: scriptability.
Anyone capable of writing scripts to, say, swap source fi les
procedurally (and you know who you are) now has a way
to get at this data without having to open After Effects in
order to do it.

This feature may open the door to more easily editable
properties appearing in an .aepx fi le in future versions of
After Effects, but these fi les are far from the equivalent
of, say, a Shake script, in which every virtually line is easily
understood and potentially editable.
Memory Management
In OS X, After Effects can see and use up to 3.5 GB of
physical memory. Your machine may have more total RAM
than this, but most applications on a Mac are still limited
to 32-bit 4 GB address spaces.
On Windows XP, the maximum amount of memory supported
for a single application is 4 GB (again, using 32-bit
4 GB address spaces). According to Microsoft, however,
“The virtual address space of processes and applications is
still limited to 2 GB unless the /3GB switch is used in the
Boot.ini fi le.” Editing this fi le is out of the scope for this
book, so check out microsoft.com for specifi c information.
Extra memory is most helpful for multiprocessing, because
each process has the just described memory potential. With
multiprocessing, you could use the maximum memory on
an 8 core (or more—only rumored at this writing) system.
Conclusion
You’ve reached the end of Section I (assuming you’re reading
this book linearly, that is) and should now have a fi rm
grasp on getting the most out of the After Effects workfl ow.
Now it’s time to focus more specifi cally on the art of visual
effects. Section II, “Effects Compositing Essentials,” will
teach you the techniques, and Section III, “Creative Explorations,”
will show you how they work in specifi c effects
situations.
Now comes the fun part.