Speculative Preview Now Available in 18.4x37

[jenkmeister]

Today we are excited to announce the availability of Speculative Preview in After Effects beta, available in builds 18.4x37 or newer. Download the latest build from Creative Cloud Desktop.

What is Speculative Preview? While AE is idle (e.g., you’ve stopped to admire your beautiful design, checking email, or getting coffee, etc.), the composition that has focus (and any pre-comps in that comp) will begin automatically rendering in the background. You’ll see green cache marks appearing as frames are rendered and you will not lose your place in the preview window. This should allow you to then scrub around the composition with frames already rendered, speeding up your design/preview iteration loop.

You can see Speculative Preview in action in the attached video. 

Please use this forum post to discuss and provide feedback. 

Thanks!

[Kes Akalaonu]

Yesterday's build seemed snappy and faster especially with Big Sur 11.5.2. Being able to change the speculative preview delay to a lower number helped speed up roto brush propogating.

[egustal]

is there a way to disable it other than just setting it to a long duration? I'm typically doing 3D animation or rendering in other windows, suddenly a large portion of RAM and CPU are wearing cement shoes. 

[jenkmeister]

You can turn it on and off from the Composition Menu -> Preview -> Cache Frames When Idle. 

[egustal]

ah perfect, I was looking everywhere but there!

[thomasser]

Is there a way to turn it off entirely? At first I thought that´s a neat feature, but boy is it messing with my patience! When replayblast out of Maya, I obviously do not always close after effects, therefore after 15 seconds AE starts to litter my RAM, so Maya can´t process (f.e. not cached, heavy bifrost sim). Please let the user decide, what they need and what they´d rather like to deactivate.

Or at least let me change the idle delay to 5000 seconds!

[thomasser]

stupid me, just saw the answer 2 posts above...

[cafeny]

Speculative Preview is a very nice feature.

I would like to see the ability to "render any given composite in the background in AE", similar to the background rendering feature we had before.

For example, it would be ideal to have a command to render a preview of a selected item in the project panel in the background.

Therefore, this is a workaround.
https://twitter.com/Oddernod/status/1408417953209589762

Currently, this is only available in the active compo.

Also, a scripting API would be much appreciated.

I'm waiting for this feature to be added!

[Saif5FD3]

Just to let you know this was the most annoying thing to figure out how to turn off. I am trying to get into a meeting and my computer is lauching and taking off like a rocket fans running full speed and I didn't even know that aftereffects was doing this in the background. 

[Kes Akalaonu]

Toggle off Cache Frames while Idle off in Menubar>Composition>Preview>Cache Frames While Idle. You can also modify the timing of it in Preferences>Previews

[Chad29284893c6se]

Love this feature, would love if you could add a checkbox to the Cache Frames When Idle preferences to allow it to cache all comps in project in addition to the comp in focus.

[UnderTheStairs]

Good call.

Personally, I'd prefer it to cache only the precomps in the comp I have open in front of me at any given time, that way it avoids caching comps I'm rarely opening. This would be more like a 'smart cache' feature and a more optimised and efficient use of RAM.