Ram Preview on After Effects CS6, completely out of order.

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
November 22, 2012
4 replies
27566 views

Hi! First of all, sorry if my English is not perfect, I'm from France but I'll try to do my best to make this message understandable.

I have recently worked on my first big project (2weeks of work) with After effects CS6, and I had really BIG problems with the Ram Preview.

Basically, the Ram Preview on After Effects CS6, is not reliable at all and has really bogus behavior.

For example when I hit "0" on the numeric pad (to start the rendering of the Ram preview), some times it won't start render, or it will take super long time before starting to calculate frames. Instead if I hit the "space bar" it will start immediately. But with method you're not seen your animation in "real time" and with no sound and it's not what I want to do.

Some times while rendering it won't show you the green progress bar so can't really know how many frames are calculated.

After the the Ram preview is over, and I make a change in let's say frame 150 (that have no effect in previous frames), and even some times without any changes, and want to see my Ram Preview again, the computer will start to render from frame 1 again, loosing all the previous frames that were already calculated before and after the changing frames...

...And there are many other examples...

Working in this conditions is very frustrating, and it requires much more time for the same results.

In order to find solution and searching the net, I tried different settings related to CPU, RAM allocated to each processor and disk cache, but nothing worked.
At the end, I found a solution that works in a way. The "solution" is to deactivate multiprocessing rendering. Then you get a reliable ram preview again but that renders on only one processor so once again you loose a lot of speed.

My computer is IMac, Intel Core i7 @ 2.8GHz, with 16GB of RAM.

So if there's anybody experiencing the same problem, tell me.

And I'd like to know if Adobe is aware of this problem.

Thanks for reading.

Merlin PARDO.

This topic has been closed for replies.

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ErikWTN

Participant

I'm having the same problem with RAM previews not working correctly or at all with multiprocessing enabled. Sometimes it works but then it will start having longer and longer delays before starting to render and then it will just not render at all. Merlin's original post was over six months ago so does anyone know if this has been fixed yet? I just got a new PC at work with dual 6 core xeon CPUs with hyperthreading that read as 24 available processors in AE -- but I can only use one???

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AjS VB

Known Participant

I'm experiencing very similar problems. When I hit RAM preview it takes between 7 and 30 seconds to start the render process, which is fast once it starts. For large projects this is maddening. I've tried every setting I can think of it has 0 affect on the issue.

I don't expect to get a real solution as over the years I've just learned to live with AE quirks. I'm sure some will want to blame the system which is a 3770k running at (4.4ghz) 32GB RAM, Asus p8z77a-v deluxe board and an nivida GTX 660 2GB hardware enabled (hacked) video card all running on a Samsung SSD. Others apps are lightning fast and even Premiere performs fantastic, but of course as I live in AE it tortures me to no end now.

But no, you are not alone with this. I also get strange behavior at times where dozens of AE windows flash on the task bar for a few seconds before locking in and rendering whatever it is I'm working with. Current settings are NO disk cache, NO render multiple frames. Projects start off smooth with instant previews but when it gets busy with many different clips things get like I've described above. Should mention I work mostly with Canon XF100 footage for HDV projects maybe the codec has an impact.

Mylenium

Legend

Media Cache flaking out, no doubt....

Mylenium

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Rick Gerard

Community Expert

The first thing you should do to troubleshoot this problem is turn off Render Multiple frames simultaneously in Preferences. The second thing is to turn off disk cache. That should get your previews running as smooth as your system can handle. Then, if you want, go back into the preferences and turn things on one at a time. Both multi frame rendering and disk cache are very hard to get setup properly because system and software configurations are so different.