After Effects freezes when switching to different application

[Moritz5E80]

Hey there,

I've had this problem for about a week now. Whenever I work in Adobe After Effects 2022 (v.22.5) and try to switch to any other opened program (like explorer, firefox, premiere etc) my whole pc freezes for about 5 seconds followed by a black screen for 20 seconds - after that my pc unfreezes, but the preview panel in after effects is white and I have to restart after effects again.

Also what I noticed is, that videos that where opened on firefox also turn white/green or previews in premiere don't show anything as well.

I tried switching hardware-accelaration on and off for composition and stuff, switching from CUDA to OPENGL to software only. Nothing works.

Im on Windows 11 with NVIDIA RTX 3080ti, intel i7-12700k, 64gb DDR4 RAM, 2tb pcie4.0 SSD.

I honestly don't know what to do, appreciate any help ❤️

[Rick Gerard]

Memory allocated to other apps should be an even-numbered multiple of 4 GB. 4, 8, and 12 are almost always better settings than 2, 3, 5, or even 10. 

Try resetting your preferences by holding down Shift + Alt/Option + Ctrl/Cmnd when you open After Effects. My Preferences file was recently corrupted. I could not get more than a couple of frames in a Ram Preview, and creating a new comp took a long time. Resetting Preferences, then going back and setting up every panel the way I always set up my Preferences solved the problem. 

If that does not work, try rolling back one build. Open the Creative Cloud app/All Apps panel. Click on the three dots to the right of the Open button for After Effects and choose Other Versions. If that fixes the problem, then the problem is related to the build. If that is the case, report a bug.

[Moritz5E80 · Accepted solution]

Hey there, thank you so much for replying. However, I was able to fix the issue by deactivating the "hardware accelerated decoding". For anyone having the same issue:

In After Effects go to Edit -> Preferences -> Import -> check if  "hardware accelerated decoding" under "video footage" is enabled. Make sure that is turned off!

Then restart AE.

[SuperSamC]

Life Saver!
I was on the edge of ripping out my GPU and throwing it into the lake.

I was having an issue where if I had a Premiere window open, and moved a clip in to after effects to work on, the moment I clicked back into Premiere, screen would freeze, turn black, all monitors would be white. I had to force close premiere, and after effects would throw a GPU error at me. I've NEVER had these kinds of issues before.