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E
emdiar
Inspiring
October 31, 2022
Question

Preview stalling in comp with animated shape layers

  • October 31, 2022
  • 4 replies
  • 236 views

Has anyone else had this problem, and found a solution?

 

Whenever I use spacebar or numpad 0 to start a preview in a comp that has animated shape layers, the preview will play for 2-4 frames and then stop for anywhere from half a second to several seconds, then resume. If there's audio in the comp, the audio plays out of sync, as though the audio playbec didn't stall while the video playback did. Usually the audio stops completely after a couple of seconds.

 

This happens when I start preview playback. It doesn't happen when the playhead hits animation keyframes, it's relative to the start of playback.

 

It happens when the preview bar is completely green.

 

It's making it impossible to usefully play back video that I have masked by the shape layers, and to edit the speed curves for my shape animations.

 

I have encountered this phenomenon for several versions of After Effects on three different computers with various nVidia GTX driver releases, but it's never been this bad, and I've never had a comp like this where it ruins my ability to work in the comp. I run into it no matter how many resources other programs are using.

 

My specs:

OS: Windows 11 Pro 10.0.22621

CPU: i7 11700K

Motherboard: Asus Rog Strix Z590-E Wifi

RAM: 64GB Kingston Fury Renegade DDR4 3600

Graphics card: Asus Rog Strix GTX 1080 Ti OC 11G

Graphics driver: 516.94 Studio (I rolled back from a later release to troubleshoot an issue with plugins crashing Premiere Pro)

Program: After Effects 23.0.0

 

Thanks for any help.

-Mike

This topic has been closed for replies.

4 replies

Mylenium
Mylenium
Legend
November 1, 2022

Any expressions or effects on the layers? Temporal trickery could be messing with AE's logic.

 

Mylenium 

E
emdiarAuthor
Inspiring
October 31, 2022

And I have discovered that it's only within the comp with shape layers that the problem happens - when I preview a comp that the offending comp is nested in, it previews with absolutely no problem at all.

E
emdiarAuthor
Inspiring
October 31, 2022

I should add that I can scrub the timeline with total smoothness and no stalling when the preview bar is green. It's only when I try to play the preview that I get the problem. And it happens no matter what quality I select in the comp window,

 

I have purged all memory and deleted my cache, but this has had no effecct on the problem.

Mylenium
Mylenium
Legend
October 31, 2022

Sounds like a cache issue. It may be worth restricting the disk cache to the bare minimum needed to avoid AE checking integrity and consolidating forever. And for 2023 of course turning off multiframe rendering may also help.

 

Mylenium 

E
emdiarAuthor
Inspiring
October 31, 2022

Thanks for the reply. I tried disabling multi-frame rendering, no change. I then reduced disk cache to 1GB, no change. I also disable Mercury Transmit, also no change, (I purged memory and disk cache between each change.)

 

I also switched from hardware to software rendering in the project settings. The problem still happens, but the amount of time the playhead stalls is consistently much shorter. But the sound is still out of sync, and the problem is still significant enough that it inhibits my workflow.

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