After Effects 2023 crashes when playing back sequences

[ryanesta]

Hey everyone,

After installing the new After Effects 2023, I've been experiencing crashes like I've never seen before, which render the program useless. I started working on 2 new projects and at a certain point, AE started crashing as soon as I hit play in a sequence. One of the sequences is insanely simple: just a precomp of an Illustrator file that doesn't even have any keyframes. I hit play and boom, crashes (with no error by the way). I'm not using any 3rd party plugins in these, btw.

Has this been happening to anyone else? I called Adobe support and we went through the following:

• Turned off multi-threading
• Turned off GPU/CUDA playback
• Created a brand new AE project and imported the other ones into it
• Made sure graphics card drivers and Windows is updated to latest versions
• Repaired all Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable instances under "Apps & Features"
• Cleared all rendered files, database, and cache
• Removed all 3rd party plugins

If I save the files using 22.x compatibility and then open them with AE 2022, I have no problem. So there is something clearly wrong happening only within version 2023 that's different from previous versions. After all the troubleshooting the Adobe tech said I should just "reinstall Windows" which makes no sense, especially since they didn't collect any logs or prove in any way that this is the root cause. They also said I'm "the only one experiencing this issue" so if anyone else out there is having this happening, please add a comment. To be clear, I'm not ruling out something on my system causing the issue - but I need to know where to look so I can try to fix it.

I attached a crash log from the last time I reproduced the issue: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15DTaaH7v4VPWLyVWR4l37qSKXXegEzD-/view?usp=sharing

My system info:

Windows 10 Home 22H2 (19045.2364)

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X 16-Core Processor 3.40 GHz

Nvidia Geforce GTX 1660 (which I confirmed is on the Premiere Pro supported CUDA list)

Thanks!

[ryanesta · Accepted solution]

Just wanted to follow up on this in case someone comes across this same problem.

The issue seems to have been a random bug where if I chose a specific SSD drive to put the cache on, it would crash. By changing it to a different SSD drive, it worked fine. Both drives are the same manufacturer (just different sizes) and I've never had problems before. But if you're having crashing problems, try putting your cache on a different drive.

I should also note I haven't had any problems with Premiere's caching at all, on any of my drives. This only seems to affect After Effects somehow.