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Eddy86
Participant
March 10, 2019
Question

After effects preview lag and stutter

  • March 10, 2019
  • 2 replies
  • 21345 views

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

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    2 replies

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    Eddy86Author
    Participant
    March 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.

    R
    Community Expert
    Rick GerardCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    March 27, 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.

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    beno0055
    Participant
    November 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.

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      Community Expert
      Rick GerardCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      March 11, 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.

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        OddballRandall
        Participant
        December 23, 2021

        This is amazing advice!

        I love it when ONE PARAGRAPH explains so much.

        Thank you.

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