After effects preview lag and stutter

Report · Mar 10, 2019

Hello,

I have troubles with with preview window and audio signal.

As you can see in the video (link bellow) something is wrong, and I'm not able to do anything in AE.

Adobe After effects preview stutter - YouTube

I bought Adobe Creative Cloud few months ago, and now when I really need to use AE, I simply can't.

I hope you will get me solution for this, time is ticking for me and I don't really know what to do with this.

Best regards,

Eddy

Report · Mar 10, 2019

If you are new to AE the hardest part to learn is how to effectively use the preview feature. Please spend some time with the user guide: Basic AE

Just poking around in the UI is a waste of time. It also looks like your comp is several minutes long, your magnification factor is set to half and the resolution set to full. This tells me you do not understand ram preview or the efficient use of the UI. AE is not an editing app and is not designed to playback in real time. 90% of AE comps are one shot under 7 seconds. You edit in Premiere Pro. You create visual effects in AE.

It looks like some kind of distortion effect has been applied, but we no nothing about your workflow or your design goals so we can't help you there. If you are trying to add an effect to a shot that is going to run several minutes long then preview a few seconds of the shot with the Magnification Factor set to 50% and the comp resolution set to Auto, maybe even skipping frames, to see if the motion is correct, then set magnification factor to 100% and check a few frames, then render. You are never going to get a ram preview that lasts for the entire comp because the entire comp would have to render and be stored in RAM.

Report · Dec 23, 2021

This is amazing advice!

I love it when ONE PARAGRAPH explains so much.

Thank you.

Report · Mar 26, 2019

Thank you for your information, Rick.

Anyways, I was in touch with the Adobe support guy, he was on my PC via remote access and we literally spent 4 hours trying to solve the problem.

At the very end, he told me there's big update coming out and this update will fix the issue.

Well, I don't really know what to think about this at the moment.

Report · Mar 26, 2019

I think the issue includes your inexperience with ram previews, possibly the format of the video because some formats are much harder to playback in real time than others, your system resources, and trying to do way too much in a single comp. More than 90% of my comps are under seven seconds long, I try and never work on frames that are not going to be in the final project, and I do not rely on full resolution ram previews to make decisions on any animation timing. You should be able to get four or five seconds of half rez real-time preview on a very modest system unless your source footage is almost completely incompatible with AE. I would not wait for an update to fix this kind of problem, I would spend some time experimenting with simple projects like just animating a solid, and try different types of footage. It's highly unlikely that the next update will give you a huge boost in performance. You just have to learn to use the tool in the most efficient way possible.

Report · Nov 10, 2019

Respectfully Rick, Ram Previews have been broken for quite some time in most versions of After Effects. If my computer has already cached the preview it should be able to play back in real time. This functionality always used to work flawlessly, but have been consistently buggy since.

Unfortunately the answer for most of these slow ram preview threads are to update to the newest version of AE.

Report · Nov 05, 2020

Thanks for sharing @beno0055 ! I was having the same (lagging) issue until I switched to the new version (AE 2020). The preview stopped lagging immediately! Problem solved. Yayy!!

However, it looks like AE 2020 required a higher version of Intel and NVDIA video drivers (than AE 2019). I ignored the warning message and chose 'continue with known issues'. Will that cause other problems in the future? Just wondering if that happened to you when switching to the updated version of AE as well?

Report · Jan 12, 2021

After effects preview lags and stutters like crazy, and i'm an experienced user...