Slow or no playback of comps in AE

[hellopaul4]

Since today's update, I cannot play back comps in AE at all. Pressing spacebar (and I haven't changed any settings in the Preview panel) or clicking the play icon in the Preview panel does nothing other than change the Preview panel's 'play' icon to the 'playing' icon. I can scrub through the comp fine, with no delay at all - I have a full green bar across the duration of the comp. It happens in any comps, even really simple ones (eg. one, very simple .ai logo with a slow zoom over 10 secs in a 1920x1080 25fps comp). I've tried turning the Disk Cache off and on, and emptied it - it makes no difference.

Quitting and restarting AE cures it, only for the problem to reappear some time later.

I'm on the latest Beta AE (22.1.0x9) and my graphics drivers are up to date.

[jenkmeister]

Can you enable logging from the Help menu and then reproduce the issue and post the log back? 

[Matnesss]

I have never been able to reliably playback comps in AE on my 2017 iMac pro 27".   Drops frames 90% of the time on even the simplest compositions.  Scrubbing works great.  The beta seems a little better than the release version (which is why I use it) but still not great.  I found out during the Pandemic that AE plays back fine on my 2013 old iMac at home (last iMac with a NVidia card perhaps?). So no I have to work at home on an 8 year old computer whenever I need to do critical timing work in AE.  Fixing this would be my number 1 priority for the AE team.  Here is a link to a thread about the problem:   https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/ram-preview-not-in-real-time/m-p/12091090/p... 

[jenkmeister]

Try today's beta (22.1x22). We found an issue late yesterday that was causing some machines to fall back to a mode where playback would be significantly impacted. We made a change to fix that. Would love to know if that fixes the problem?

[hellopaul4]

A similar problem seems to have appeared in 22.1.0x34. I've reported details here:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/pti-and-cti-not-moving-on-preview/m-p/12450...

[jenkmeister]

Thanks. Taking a look to see what might have changed in that build to see what's going on. 

[Matnesss]

Very simple compostion here.  I have a green render bar, and the composition is playing back at only ~10 fps.  I enabled logging and am posting it back here.  Please fix this.  After Effects is pretty much unusalbe on my iMac Pro for any animation that requires previewing in realtime.  

 

 

[hellopaul4]

I've been seeing problems occasionally with slow playback despite the green bar. I've been using Superluminal Stardust, and AE will render the green bar, then when playing back (slowly), I'll see in the Info Panel something about the number of particles that Stardust is rendering, suggesting that AE is not playing from the cache at all, but re-rendering what it's just rendered. It's the same whether I have the Disk Cache turned on or off (I normally turn it off because I have 128GB RAM and usually work on short - maybe 10sec, 1920x1080 25fps - comps).

[jenkmeister]

Thanks for the log. We are taking a look to see what is happening. 

[Matnesss]

Thank you.  Let me know if there is anything I can test for you to help you solve this.  This has been a very frustrating issue off and on for a long wile now (since the old "ram preview" went away).   I have 3 displays, and the problem seems to happen more often when I am spread out over multiple displays.  I also have only had the problem on my iMac Pro 2017 and not on my older iMac 2013 despite using multiple displays on both.

[hellopaul4]

I updated (today) to 22.1.0 Build 46, and the problem is REALLY bad now (maybe it's just this particular. very simple project I'm working on?). I'm getting slow renders, frames re-rendering when they've just been rendered (and the timeline is green), and then  ~6fps playback of cached frames (the 20sec-long comp is 1920x1080 25fps, 8bpc, so nothing even remotely taxing. It has three ~1000px x 1000px RGB TIFFs with no effects, one incredibly simple shape layer and 4 lines of text with a drop shadow). If I turn off MFR in the prefs, AE is immediately back to its old, fast self, with fast preview renders, and perfect 25fps playback. I'm leaving MFR off for now.

[jenkmeister]

Nothing is changing with MFR right now, so that's concerning that it's getting worse for you. Are you able to share the project or try it on another computer? 

[hellopaul4]

I wonder if it's related to these issues I'm having (CTI not moving, playbackstats not appearing in Info Panel): https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/pti-and-cti-not-moving-on-preview/m-p/12452...

Should the playback rate ALWAYS appear in the Info Panel when a comp is being previewed? It often does not appear at all in recent releases, or it seems like it's not updating - eg. I can hit spacebar to start a preview, AE starts playing back/rendering slowly, then it'll loop back to the start and play back at full speed (if I'm lucky), the the Info Panel will report "fps: 20.805/25 (NOT realtime)" and that figure will remain completely static while the comp loops playback repeatedly.

[jenkmeister]

I'm thinking it might be related. I don't have a repro case here internally on either of those bugs. Not to say they aren't issues, I just don't have a repro myself. It might be worth backing up your AE Beta preferences, then deleting them so AE can recreate them. Wondering myself if something has gotten into a bad state and AE is doing something it's not supposed to do on your machine.