After Effects 2015 won't preview in real time after El Capitan update.

[AMAX]

Hello,

Has anyone experienced the following issue and found a solution for it?

Right after Update to El Capitan 10.11 the After Effects 2015 stopped ram previewing in real time.

No matter what i do it won’t work.

I have a latest MAC Pro 2.7 GHz 12-Core with 64GB ram.

The AE 2014 still works though.

[Clever_Cosmos15C2]

Todd_Kopriva wrote:

Playback speed issues are a major area of focus for our next few months. Depending on the magnitude of the work, we might have some improvements in our January update. If the problem is bigger than that, it may take until our spring update.

As many folks are reporting, something changed in Mac OS X v10.11 that makes transferring the pixels to the screen slower than in previous versions of the OS. We've got some folks digging into why now.

Maybe you should have tested a little bit before releasing a version so full of bugs.

AE CC2015 is a joke and Adobe is seriously loosing my trust right now.

The Ram Preview issue is one among many others...

[georgecasualfilms]

Hey Todd,

Any time frame for the update? Not asking for the fix magically tomorrow (although that would be lovely), just want to know when/if this will be sorted.

Thanks,

[danofrench]

I want to know too. This problem is driving me crazy and I'm running AE on a friggi'n $13K Mac Pro!

[VPCEdit6]

I've moved back to After Effects CC14 for our client work.  I still get constant crashes while working or rendering.  Kernel panics, AE crash, exit to log in screens.  It seems like it might be tied to Quicktime 7 and the Adobe QT32 Server.  It just a waiting and hoping game here until they work out bugs for El Capitan and iMacs that use the Skylake processors.  Hopefully by AE CC 2016 we can get a stable version.  My 8-core MacPro tower is slower but much more reliable running CC 2014 on OS X Mavericks

.

[luke Infinger]

I am dealing with an issue. When I hit the button to RAM preview, frame-by-frame I can hear the audio. This is extremely annoying! I do not want to hear the audio until full playback. Has anyone else dealt with this?

[georgecasualfilms]

If you go to Preferences then Previews, you can check the box saying "Mute Audio When Preview Is Not Real-time." This should work but if you're having the same ram preview glitch as we all are here, it won't work that well for you at the moment.

[Postmen]

Hi Tod,

I have encountered the problem too, AE2015 does not seem to preview in realtime. But (other people have mentioned this before)

Preview does play in realtime under the following conditions;

- when the timeline is zoomed in on a part that is not being previewing

- when another panel (not the timeline) is maximised

- when on the timeline “panel group settings / Stacked Panel Group” is selected

In all cases the preview seems to work fine when the playhead is offscreen. But when the playhead is onscreen frame rates drop immediately. I hope this helps in finding a solution to this serious problem.

[STBEE]

Running AE2015 on brand new imac 5K, and so glad I found this post.  I can now workaround to get full frame rate simply by dragging the top panel section down so the whole timeline panel gets hidden out of sight.

I'm not happy.  Just grimly relieved that the hell of trying to create motion graphics to match momentum of an audio track without real time preview is now significantly mitigated.  I absolutely HATE Adobe for the time, money and stress they have caused me over the past few weeks and months.

[dissidently]

Unfortunately the kinds of people that work in management and development in big companies lack sufficient empathy to understand why you'd feel this way.

And they have a marketing department to find new customers to find ways to replace those that do.

They just don't care.

[Michael_Barrett_01]

I get the sense that many on the After Effects team do care.  Todd Kopriva cares.  Probably many more behind the scenes as well.

[Clever_Cosmos15C2]

If they do care, it's not very visible.

There are many threads on this issue and still not a correct answer. (And it's really not the only problem on After Effects far from it. But this one is just, how can you release a software with a problem like this!?)

If you call them, like I did, they try play fool and tell you that After Effects it's not Premiere and that it's not supposed to preview in real time.

It's a bit crazy...

How can you trust a company that does not acknowledge the most evident problems?!

[elbagly]

Its a broader problem... Its very hard to keep up these days.. Its seems like all vendors are rushing to bring upgrades and the result is inability to preform the basic work

We can't use 2 brand new iMacs we bought

Adobe AE 2015 won't play

Blackmagic Ultra SDI USB3 won't play

Apple won't let us install 10.10

Nothing to do but wait for everybody to get in sync...

[Clever_Cosmos15C2]

What you say is totally true.

Always bringing something new, but the quality is going down big time.

About your OSX problems, if you want to go back to previous versions, maybe you can do it by going to the "App Store" and then to "Purchased", and if you have a Mac for some time, you should see the previous version of OSX that you had installed available for download...

[elbagly]

Unfortunately there is no option to run any version but 10.11 and later. They came preinstalled with 10.11 and won't boot with anything but 10.11 I tried everything

[dissidently]

Try Bootcamp and Windows 7.

Avoid Windows 8 and 10.

[georgecasualfilms]

Pretty hilarious bootcamp is being thrown around as a solution to this problem.

Has anyone heard from Adobe recently on this?

[ccolbertemg]

EXACTLY!  No way in the world I'm putting Windows on my money-making creative machine.  I installed Windows on Parallels two years ago because I wanted to use one app.  I got a virus before I even finished installing it!  I had to wipe my whole system and restore from a time machine backup.  Nope, not a solution.

[dissidently]

Do not connect to the internet, at all, when installing Windows on a Mac in bootcamp.

Download everything you need when in OS X. This is the safest and best way to run Windows. By a country mile. I never connect my windows machines directly to the internet. No need. And I don't like doing reinstalls.

[Clever_Cosmos15C2]

Any way all these "solutions" are only work arounds.

Only Adobe can and should make a product that simply works for professionals.

123 posts and so few from Adobe.... (Edit :127 posts)

[dissidently]

I know. I know.

But it really is the best solution when you find yourself in this predicament.

You'll find Illustrator, Indesign and Premiere also work FAR faster within Windows 7 on your new Mac than within Mac OS X.

Yet Maya has similar performance in both Operating Systems on the same hardware. So I'd say that's Adobe's laziness and cost cutting on Mac development coming to the party. Perhaps a side effect of Apple's war on Flash, which was a side effect of Adobe's betrayal of their original agreements with Apple over creative software.

[LArobWalkerAE]

Not recently. Adobe's Product Manager for Visual Effects and Motion Graphics,Todd Kopriva, was a tremendous advocate for us at Adobe, but he is transitioning out of the company between now and NAB in April, and his successor, Victoria Nece, has yet to chime in on this as far as I can tell.

[jeff-7117]

Todd had mentioned on a previous thread that it was definitely an El Capitan and pixel redraw issue.  Nothing much else from Adobe.  It would be nice to hear that they are working on it, but no one has replied to this thread that I know of.

While bootcamp may be an option for some, it won't be for everyone, especially those that rely on ProRes codecs as part of their workflow.  I used to take up for Adobe when others criticized them for treating the Mac platform as an afterthought.  But, after train wrecks like this, I'm not so sure any more.  Like I said earlier, this would have and should have been caught in beta testing.  If it was, it wasn't communicated to the public very well.

[coastalmedia]

Joe_Walker wrote:

I'm pretty sure Adobe was clear about El Capitan not currently being supported. I made the mistake of upgrading and just had to suck it up and reinstall Yosemite - Problem solved. Nothing really that special about El Capitan anyway. I'd rather have stable software until Apple patches. Obviously a tough lesson in early adoption for some, based on the nasty rants.

I'm still on Yosemite, not even attempted to update, and playback is still terrible for me. Hence my chiming in...

[Joe_Walker-PLUO9I]

Maybe it had something to do with my clean install of Yosemite. What a mess.

[Rick Gerard]

While it's not a fix for the bug for you, if you set the Preview Panel to skip a frame or skip 2 you can get the audio to play just fine. The motion may appear a bit jerky but you should be able to be productive. Personally I seldom preview more than a second or two of a comp at full rez with all effects applied.

A far more productive workflow for me is to get the motion and the timing of an animation down first in draft mode or lower resolution, then add effects and motion blur checking only key portions of the animation, then send the project to the AME for rendering while I move on to another comp. Waiting around for 20 or 30 seconds of my comp to ram preview is such a waste of my time that I can't afford it. I even do the same thing any NLE when I'm cutting. I'll spin through the shots very quickly to get close to the edit point, find the exact frame by stepping through the footage one frame at a time, then move to the next shot and find the in point. I'll then drag the CTI through the edit and check the cut, then move on. Most of the first cut is done at 2X speed or faster (k and l keys in Premiere Pro). Only when a sequence or scene is complete will I go back and watch it in real time. I learned how to do that cutting news on film with a Movscope, sync block and a couple of rewinds. Under a deadline we would spin through the footage and break off shots and hang them around our neck, put on a new reel and start building the story by taping the shots together, then find the cut point and hot splice the film at the cut point, and move on. The story would be spun through just slow enough so you could understand the sound if you had it and then the reels would be sent to master control to be loaded to the film chain. It forced me to have confidence in my work and  I knew exactly what I was going to get without having to play it all back in real time. You can learn to have confidence in your AE work without having to preview everything in real time before you send it to the lab (renderer). You'll be more productive and in the long run, more productive. When AE gets to the point where effects can be applied and watched in real time I'm going to be looking for a way to scrub through them at 2X speed or faster and I'm going to be creating longer sequences in AE. I still won't be watching very many previews of the entire project until it's done and polished.