AE freezing, but not crashing

[kylen1290505]

I've been having this weird thing happening over the past few weeks with after effects and I'm curious if anyone else has experienced this. After Effects will just freeze the display on whatever I'm working on and won't change when I move somewhere else in the timeline. I can still "use" after effects, like keyframes, adding effects, opening new comps, etc... but I won't see any of it happening in the display window. When I try to close and restart AE, I get the spinning wheel indefinitely until I force quit. It mostly happens if I get up from my desk for a few minutes and come back. Even just 5 minutes. It also happens often halfway through a render. But it never officially crashes. 

A coworker hadn't experienced this, but when she opened the project and tried to render, the same thing happened to her. I deleted all color correction on the footage, and just left in the keying, masks, etc. Then I finally got a finished render. As soon as I added Lumetri, Color Balance, Selective Color, Vibrance... It went back to freezing.

I am working on a comp with R3D files, about a minute long, green screen keying, color correction, minimal graphics. Nothing outside of the ordinary of what I normally do. 

Has anyone experienced this, or figured out how to fix it?

[ToolfarmJP]

The cause sounds like the issue of codec or the graphice card driver. You update your graphic card driver first?

[ShiveringCactus]

That sounds exactly like the issue I was experiencing when using Windows File Explorer to find files to import.  Turns out, it was an issue with a setting in Preferences > Import called "Enable Hardware decoding".  It is something to do with the GPU as ToolFamrJP says.  My buest guess is that File Explorer was trying to use the same part of the GPU and the conflict was causing the freeze.  I did find that while I could do somethings after a freeze, a lot of other GPU reliant stuff would fail.  I unchecked that setting and the problem has disappeared.

[MateoMatthias]

Same issue with the playback problem! Any other ideas? The "Enable Hardware decoding" didn't work for me.

[RGB_Maestro]

That sounds really frustrating! I’ve seen similar freezing issues in After Effects when using Lumetri and other color correction effects, especially with high-resolution footage like R3D files. Maybe it's a GPU processing issue or a memory leak? It reminds me of how some older game engines handled resource-heavy tasks—kind of like the differences in optimization between Stardew Valley vs Harvest Moon. Have you tried disabling GPU acceleration or clearing the cache to see if it helps?