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Question

Dreaded After Effects RAM Preview Nightmare

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
February 13, 2025
2 replies
708 views

System Specs: Macbook M2 ProMax, 64 GB RAM, 1 TB Storage

Additional NVME External Drive (holds Media)

Additional NVME -WD Black (fast. fast) for cache

Currently my preview runs about 4 frames and then wait 15 minutes another 2 frames, I go for a jog come back... 20 whole frames rendered, still 8000 more to go....

Frustrated obviously - Tried different configs, moving location of cache, media, conformed media cache (what is that anyway??) and database. Tried preview settings, skip frame, disable multiframe rendering, devoted almost my entire system to AE. My hair is falling out. Help

R

Rick Gerard

Community Expert

If your Comp and Preview resolution is set to 1/2 or 1/4, and you don't have recursive expressions or effects added that are notoriously slow to render, you should get a decent RAM preview.

Without seeing what is happening in the layers, it is impossible to determine what might be causing the slowdown. Try turning off your heavy effects layers or disabling some of the effects you have added.

Eight thousand frames is a very long comp. Can you break it up into smaller sections? I usually have only one shot in my comps because AE is not designed to edit scenes or movies. You might try breaking the comp up into smaller sections. Mine are usually less than seven seconds long because I almost never have a single shot in a movie that is longer than seven seconds.

M

Messages from HarbingersAuthor

Participating Frequently

It is not just when rendering footage, it freezes up with comps consisting of only native effects. Simple text animations are a chore. Forget about using particle world or other sims, that is a day long endeavour to get 5 seconds of usuable frames.

E

Estelle_Baylis

Participant

Hi Metal God. Did you ever find a solution? I seem to be experiencing the same issue. RAM preview works on a few attempts and then stops working. I've taken the usual steps to try fix the issue, even uninstalling/reinstalling AE. I've been working with AE for a very long time and have never experienced this. I'm currently on a Dell laptop and was wondering if it's a Windows issue but noticed you're on a Mac, so obviously not.

Very frustrating...

M

Messages from HarbingersAuthor

Participating Frequently

Oh and tried Beta with the HD cache giving it like 900 gb. Worse.

nishu_kush

Legend

Hi Metal God. Sorry for the frustration.

What are the details of the media (frame rate, frame size, format/codec)? Which device was used to record it? Are there any effects applied? Does lowering the preview resolution improve the playback? Try clearing the media cache (Purge > Edit > All Memory & Disk Cache). Also, try to keep the cache location on a local drive.

Let us know.

Thanks,
Nishu

M

Messages from HarbingersAuthor

Participating Frequently

Oh its useless to render. I have to scrub frame by frame. It is def effect and keyframe intensive hence me buying all the extra drives. I have it on adapative setting for res. I purge often. Too often. But like sometimes it will be 500gb and other times when locked up it will be like 10gb in cache, bizarreness. But it doesn't seem to cycle don now that you mention it. Sometimes I hit spacebar and it won't even make an effort to preview. so I restart and seems to wake it up. I reinstalled, I even wipe my macbook and reinstalled os lol. HAHA

Here is info on source material : Type: MPEG Movie File Size: 1.64 GB Image Size: 1920 x 1080 Frame Rate: 25.00 Source Audio Format: 48000 Hz - Compressed - 5.1 (L, R, C, LFE, Ls, Rs) Project Audio Format: 48000 Hz - 32 bit floating point - 5.1 (L, R, C, LFE, Ls, Rs) Total Duration: 00:54:04:01 Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.0 Alpha: None Color Space: Rec. 709 Color Space Override: Off Input LUT: None Video Codec Type: MP4/MOV H.264 4:2:0

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