Composition viewer not showing artifacts such as text

Question

I am new to after effects, however I do not belive it is operating properly and I am looking for some confirmation before I start the long journey of trying to figure it out. I am running a Dell i9 8 core 10885H processor running at 2.43gHz with 64gig ram, Nvidia Quadro RTX 3000 with Max-Q Design 6gig ram graphics card, all running in a Windows 10 Pro operating system. I have updated the drivers and I have run the compatibility test for after effects - No problems

However, while editing a project with multiple compositions and switching back and forth between those compositions within that project, I loose text in the viewer, that is to say there is nothing to edit in the viewer although it still shows up in the Layers viewer.

I though maybe I was scrolled out or in too far, or perhaps i was in wireframe or some other noob mistake, but everything I can see says its after effects being glitchy. If I save, close and repoen the file, all comes back for a while until I start switching back and forth between compositions again. I appreciate any ideas you folks may have.

Rick Gerard · Answer

Because you are new I strongly suggest you open up the Learn workspace and spend 20 minutes going through the sample project. Then spend some time with the User Guide. Don't rely on YouTube for tutorials because most of the new ones and more than 90% of the tutorials folks end up having serious problems with so they have to ask questions on this forum, are not good. They are usually presented by enthusiasts that have stumbled upon a recipe for an effect. The explanations are weak, and often the workflows are inefficient and often not recommended.

I don't know what you mean by the Text Viewer. There is a Character Panel and a Paragraph Panel to help you control fonts, but type layers show up in the Composition Panel. If you have nested type in a comp (pre-composed) then it is possible to see type in the Layer Panel, but you have to edit type in the composition panel.

The other thing that could be happening is that you are trying to stage your animations with the Comp Panel set to full resolution and the comp frame rate is higher than it should be. This can quickly fill up the disk cache and cause problems. The first place you should go if you have preview problems is to the Edit/Purge menu and clear everything.

Your comp panel resolution should almost always be set to Auto, the magnification factor for previews should usually be 50% or less, and if you need longer previews set the Preview Panel to skip a frame. All you are looking for with a motion preview is the timing and position of the animated elements. That's all. AE is not an editing app and it does not do full resolution real-time previews that are longer than a few seconds.

If you are still having problems, start exploring and using the Flow Chart to find nested comps and if you need help with a specific you need to use the toolbar to embed full UI screenshots that show the modified properties of the layers that are giving you problems. We also need a detailed workflow description and your design goals to be of much help. Reveal the modified properties on a layer by pressing "uu" (should always be your first troubleshooting step) and let us know what you are trying to do. There are a lot of folks that are glad to try and lend a hand.

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