Preview playack not working (Caching issues)

[Rolzay]

Hello,

I'm having some major issues with my After Effects (Version 16.1.3) and I have spent the last 6 hours online trying to find a solution but unfortunately without luck and at this point I don't know what to do anymore.

My issue: 

Playback stops after about 1-2 minutes of opening a project I've been trying to work on and the preview window goes grey and pressing space to initiate playback again does nothing. It seems as if the disk cache goes full and stops working. I have my disk cache set to 150GB so that clearly is not the issue.

Things I've tried so far:

– Changing Disk Cache size.

– Cleaning Disk Cache, Purging memory and clearing Database multiple times.

– Changing playback resolution.

– Resetting preferences.

– Restarting After Effects.

– Restarting PC.

– Reinstalling After Effects.

– Downgrading and trying other Nvidia drivers.

My PC specs:

AMD Ryzen 2700, 32GB RAM, 1TB Samsung SSD, RTX 2080 Ti. Windows version: Windows 10 Pro

Current Nvidia Driver Version: 436.48

My current free space on HDD: 418GB

I've had nothing but problems with Adobe apps since I moved to Windows recently and I am getting super frustrated with it because I can't get no work done until I resolve all these issues.

Please can anyone suggest any other solutions?

Thanks

[Michael Bullo]

Have you tried resetting the After Effects preferences?

https://helpx.adobe.com/au/after-effects/using/preferences.html

To restore the default preference settings, press and hold the following keys while the application is starting.
- Ctrl+Alt+Shift (Windows)
- Command+Option+Shift (Mac OS)

[Rolzay]

Forgot to mention, but yes, of course I had tried that too.

[@mj]

Hi,

You r spec looks solid.

Try purging your cache.  Edit > Purge > All memory and disk cache

Manage your cache. Preferences > Media and Disk Cache.

Increase the Mac disk cache size

good luck

[Rolzay]

Hi,

As I've mentioned above I've already tried purging memory and all of those other options and I've also increased the cache size.

[Martin_Ritter]

In the preview panel, is the option for "Playback cached frames" set?

How much RAM is assigned to AE, how much RAM is used by AE when preview rendering to the point it fails? (Note that you have to left RAM for OS, Win10 alone takes around 4GB without any running app).

(For AE, RTX 2080Ti is way overkill, since AE is not using GPU that intensive. It is always better to invest the GPU money on a highest end CPU and take a medicore GPU instead.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/After-Effects-CPU-Roundup-AMD-Ryzen-3rd-Gen-AMD-Threadrip...)

*Martin

[Rolzay]

I've tried with both checked and unchecked.

There are 26GB assigned for AE. When AE is caching the memory usage goes up to 96%.

I bought the PC mainly for use in Cinema 4D and Octane, that is why I opted in for a beast GPU instead of a CPU, but often at times I find myself working in After Effects too, and had never thought there would be these kind of issues.

But I think I may have stumbled upon a solution. 

The project I was working on I was brining in stock footage and some of those clips came with an audio attached to them. I noticed that this one specific clip caused the cache to fail. I tried other clips who had no audio attached to them and there were no problems caching. I looked at the Audio format that is assigned on the clip and they are 48.000kHz / 32 bit U / Stereo. Then I went into AE Preferences > Audio Hardware > Settings and changed my headphones default format in the advanced tab to match the settings of the clip, and I sh*t you not the clip is now caching and is working without failing. But I am still not 100% convinced and I am a bit afraid to push it in case it fails again, but so far I think that has done the trick. 

Would you know much about these audio settings and what may have caused the issue in the first place?

Thanks

[Martin_Ritter]

Yeah, other professional apps managed to jump on the GPU-train decades ago. Adobe is very lazy. Just wondered about the RTX, but this makes sense.

I'm working hardly with footage, mostly vector graphics. When it comes to sound, I only use WAV, 48kHz, since this is professional standard. I never changed the audio settings in AE, or did it once years ago.

Knowing the software for years now, I'm not wondering that a clip with mismatching audio causing a cache issue. Keep an eye on it.

*Martin

[Rolzay]

Yeah, I really begin to think Adobe just don't care about their users.

Thanks for the help!