Preview broken

[JCBKay]

In the last week orso my AfterEffects is completely broken to the point of being unusable (even though I'm still paying a full subscription every month!)

Preview breaks as soon as I make any changes on the timeline.

I open a project, the preview window works fine. I can drag along the timeline and the preview updates.

But as soon as I do anything in the timeline, e.g. move a layer, switch a layer's visibility, literally ANYTHING, the preview doesn't update anymore. So basically it's now an expensive previewing software and I can't make any changes whatsoever.

No system incompatibility issues.

Switched off ALL GPU acceleration.

Cleared caches, moved them to different harddisks.

Purged everything multiple times.

Added more memory allocation.

Restarted rebooted, even reinstalled AE.

Start new project. 

The problem persists. And I really need to use this software for its intended purposes soon!

[Rick Gerard]

Try rolling back one version or one build. Use the Creative Cloud app, click on the 3 dots to the right of the Open button for AE in the Apps section. It should only take a few minutes to install a build that does not have the problem. 

[JCBKay]

Thanks! I saw in another thread. 22.6 worked. Ugh.

Now to solve AE freezing my PC stone dead after a few minutes.

I pay around $100 a month for Adobe to deliver me migraines and lost work.

[JohnColombo]

Hi @JCBKay.,

Thank you for reporting this issue, sorry to see you're experiencing these problems.

• What are your system specs and OS version?
• Have you tried resetting the application preferences?

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

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

[JCBKay]

Windows 11 Pro
i7-12700K core, 64GB Ram
GeForce RTX 3050

Tonnes of SSD harddisk space

Drivers are up to date (Studio drivers), but even so everything is set to software rendering just in case.

Full reinstall of AE several times.

AE22.6 works for me BUT still has the issue of it freezing my PC entirely several times a day, requiring a very hard reboot. 

I need to use it to do my work and am currently just not doing it for fear of damaging my hardware. 

[JohnColombo]

Thanks for those system details, @JCBKay. Uninstall and reinstalling won't reset the preferences unless you explicitly request it, so take a look in %appdata%/Adobe/After Effects and make sure any 23.0 folders in there are either removed or renamed to something other than "23.0".

Do you have any third-party plug-ins or extensions installed? Plug-ins would generally appear in the Effects menu and extensions would be under Window > Extensions. These also can persist across versions, so it's possible that one of these is contributing to the issues in both versions.

Thanks again,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

[JCBKay]

AppData folder deleted, no extensions.

[JohnColombo]

I hope you didn't delete the entire AppData folder? Only the 23.0 folder needed to be removed or renamed.

Do you have any third-party plug-ins installed? E.g. from Red Giant, Video Co-Pilot, etc.

Cheers,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team

[JCBKay]

No, no, just the AE 23 folder but I had also previously just deleted the entire AE folder. But to no avail.

No, no extra plugins. Some Essential Graphics, since deleted. But nothing helped my issue.

[J092416]

I have the same issue. everything was perfectly fine 2 days ago now I cant do anything. also cleared cache disks and deleted so many apps for storage. when it started I had AE 2022 and just updated to 2023 and the issue carried. 

[JohnColombo]

@JCBKay Is this issue still occurring for you? We haven't been able to reproduce this bug in-house, so we may need to collect a log file in order to get more information about what is going wrong. Let me know if you're open to that and I'll provide the instructions.

[JohnColombo]

@J092416 Is this still occurring for you as well? You mentioned that it started in After Effects 2022 and persisted into After Effects 2023, which usually points to an external issue like a driver. Had you updated any GPU or other hardware drivers before the issue first began?

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

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

[J092416]

Did not update/touch anything before, GPU or drives. Can't get to my computer at the moment but will send specs sometime today. 

[JCBKay]

I'm not getting any hardware lockups at the moment. I did recently update my Geforce studio drivers so maybe that was that. But I'm still using 22.6, so I don't know if you guys managed to fix 23 yet. I don't really have the time to switch versions to check as I have things I need to finish so 22.6 will do for now.