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Known Participant
September 24, 2020
Question

AE doesn't play animation preview

  • September 24, 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 2056 views

I made a basic fractal noise animation evolution with two key frames. The animation previews when scrubbing the timeline manually with the cursor, but it doesn't play when using the preview play button. I tried rendering using pre render, but the preview still doesn't play. What am I doing wrong?

 

Am on latest AE version on Mac Catalina 10.15.6

 

Thanks for any help!

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2 replies

Community Expert
September 25, 2020

If you want us to see what is going on in the layers that are giving you problems select the layer, press the 'u' key twice, then take a full screenshot of the entire UI so we can see what is going on. Pressing 'uu' shows us everything you modified on every property that can be modified and on every effect that can be added. If you think comp settings might be important, make sure that the Project Panel is visible and select the comp. If you are worried about source footage, select the footage in the Project Panel and we can see the codec, frame rate, sound properties, and everything else that might be important to solving your problem. Cropped screenshots are almost completely useless. 

 

Your timeline shows us 6 layers and a timeline that is probably a bit over a minute long. Unless you have a monster system or are creating comps with a very small frame size, you will never get a full minute of preview time in After Effects. My average comp is one shot and seven seconds. A minute is a very long AE comp. We don't know what footage has the effects applied, what the switches and modes columns, or if any layer is parented to another layer. We don't know if you are viewing the Active Camera in the comp panel - the only view that will render, but not the only view that will preview. 

 

If fractal noise isn't animating then you have not properly set up the effect. There is no bug that would cause Fractal Noise not to animate if you have changed the values over time enough to see some movement in something. 

TC5Author
Known Participant
September 26, 2020

Thanks for your help! See my answer above for the update.

Community Expert
September 24, 2020

Try first going to menu Edit / Purge / All Memory & Disk Cache..., then try again. 

Byron.
TC5Author
Known Participant
September 24, 2020

Thanks for your help. I tried it, but the preview still doesn't play. This is the first project I made with this new AE download. It's a 60 second timeline.

TC5Author
Known Participant
September 24, 2020