Preview/Active Camera not refreshing

[WolfSZ78]

I hope everyone's having a great start to their week!

So, in short, I've been haven a recent problem with After Effects. It would happen here and there on AE 2022, but it is now becoming frequent with AE 2023. I keep running into a problem with After Effects, on both 2D and 3D projects, where the Active Camera (for 3D) and/or the Preview window won't update with the timeline. It won't even try to render when I skip around on the timeline, and if I try to preview the clip it will just stay static.

I've tried the standard troubleshooting methods, all except fully uninstalling AE 2023 and reinstalling it. I even tried duplicating the comp, creating a new comp and copying assets over, and more - since that's been my workaround thusfar for the past few days. When I tried copying the assets over to a new comp, everything was working great, and then I nudged the timeline and everything froze up on the Preview winodw once more. 

One of two things is happening:

Either the preview stays stuck on a specific frame OR the preview just disappears and I'm looking at a blank window.

Here are my specs:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10885H CPU @ 2.40GHz 2.40 GHz

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti

32.0 GB (31.8 GB usable)

Windows 10 Pro (x64)

Any tips or workarounds I can use? Is this a bug or glitch that anyone has experience with?

Anything is much appreciated!

[Mylenium]

If you are using multiple 3D views, the first thing to do would be to turn off the alternate views and switch to a single one. This is a known issue where previews just stop or AE even crashes. Otherwise I'm at a loss what to tell you, especially with so little info about your project. The whole thing working for a while suggest that there is either one of those boring "hardware acceleration not working right and causing mayhem" things or something specific to your comps liek a certain effect making a mess.

Mylenium

[darrellhaemer]

I am also having this issue. I had no problems at all until the most recent update (I don't think I used the most recent update until now). Now, AE either doesn't refresh the preview, or shows a blank window. If I restart AE, the preview will work, but as soon as I create a keyframe, it quits again. Extremely frustrating, and completely unusable. I also tried creating a fresh project with only a basic comp and imported image sequence, and it's broken right off the start. I'm going to try installing 22.6 to see if that works.

[darrellhaemer]

For me, version 22.6 is working flawlessly with the same exact files and setup. 

I'm using an RTX 2070. Normally I would expect this to be a graphics issue, but WolfSZ78 is using a GTX 1650 Ti, which is not all that similar. Adobe, let me know when you fix your stuff so I can update again.

[JohnColombo]

Hi @WolfSZ78 & @darrellhaemer,

Thank you both for reporting this issue. We haven't been able to reproduce any similar behaviors in-house, but it's possible this is either hardware dependent or related to a third-party plug-in or extension. To help us investigate further:

1. What third-party plug-ins and/or panels do you have installed, if any?
2. Does purging memory help to get the Composition window updating again?
3. When the Composition stops updating, does the thumbnail in the Project panel also stop updating?
4. What does After Effects' RAM and GPU usage look like in the Task Manager?

Thanks for reporting this issue and for any further information you can provide,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

[darrellhaemer]

It looks like a recent update (either to AE or video drivers) may have fixed the issue for me. The file that was not working before is now working correctly without me making any other changes. Thanks for responding and seeking more info though!

[davi-t]

To anyone coming to this thread looking for a solution, I've found a simple way to fix this issue. I've tried all of the methods from Google searching and the stuff on this thread. This is a quick workaround:

So, generally, this is an issue with rendering order, especially when 3D camera's are involved (Masks, 3D, layer effects, effects, etc) and AE can run into issues and get all screwy. Sometimes the render doesn't refresh, sometimes assets jump around, etc etc. For me, what fixed the issue was simply adding an extra keyframe with a negligible value so that the object is tweening something for the entire duration that it appears within the timeline. So let's say you have an object on the timeline that animates its position and there's a camera in the scene as well. After that last positional keyframe, nothing else happens but there's still timeline that's getting rendered after that last keyframe. If you add an extra positional keyframe at the very end of that duration with a negligible value (say y:120 > y:120.004), it'll force it to render properly. If you have a layer effect/effect on something without anything animating (i.e. the object has a dropshadow), and you're getting issues; just add a tween for the entire duration using values that aren't going to give a visual difference. So for example, animate the dropshadow's opacity from 100 to 99%.

This fixed it for me.