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imcaleb
imcaleb
Inspiring
July 22, 2020
Question

After Effects preview not working properly

  • July 22, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 1913 views

I posted this issue about a month ago and never received any reply. I am having an extremely frustrating issue with After Effects recently and it has to do with the playhead / preview functions freezing up.

 

Here's what the issue is and when it shows up: When I open up the project, everything works fine. I can preview the comp, add keyframes, and virtually use After Effects the way it is intended. That is until I switch my window to Adobe Premiere to preview a dynamic link of my project. Once I do that and switch back to After Effects, when I hit the spacebar to preview my comp, the Composition Window previews the composition just fine, but the playhead doesn't move and I don't get the red previewed frame indicator while the preview is playing. Then, when I pause playback, the blue playhead does not update, and spacebar activates the handtool rather than stops previewing the comp. I can manually click and drag the playhead around in the timeline, which brings the playhead back, but I cannot stop the preview using spacebar. The issue eventually leaks over to the preview window until it stops rendering my comp changes forcing me to reset After Effects.

 

This problem has been very specific to older After Effects files- created in a previous version of After Effects. I do not have this problem when I'm using newer AE files. For troubleshooting I have tried the following:

 

1. (The obvious) Purging memory and disk cache

2. Updating video drivers

3. Creating a new 2020 AE file and importing everything from the older file into the new file

4. Scouring the Adobe Support Community

 

My specs:

OS: Windows 10

Processor: Intel Core i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70 GHz

Installed RAM: 64GB

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

 

After Effects Version: 17.1.2

 

I attached a video of my screen when the problem occurs, and I will also attach a dropbox link to my After Effects project. Any help on this is greatly appreciated.

 

 

AE Project: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fj0dmnezt5fzn9w/Text%2005-08.aep?dl=0

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

nishu_kush
Community Manager
nishu_kushCommunity Manager
Community Manager
July 28, 2020

Hi imcaleb,

 

Sorry for the delay in response. Thanks for the detailed post.

Not being able to stop the preview was a known issue and it has been fixed in the latest release. I checked your file at my end and it's working without any problem which makes me think if it's related to media. Would you mind moving your media to a different location then open the project?

Let us know how it goes.

 

Thanks,

Nishu

imcaleb
imcalebAuthor
Inspiring
July 28, 2020

Thanks for the reply. I moved the entire project to a different hard drive and tried it out. Still have the same problem. The timeline works normally when the project is first opened, and then freezes up.

 

I actually figured out how to trigger the timeline freeze on a consistent basis. I have a Premiere File that has all of the comps in this After Effects inside it via dynamic link. When Premiere is closed, I do not have the After Effects problem. However, if I have the Premiere File opened and I switch the window from After Effects to Premiere and then back to After Effects the timeline bug starts happening. The problem persists in After Effects (even when opening a new project) until I restart the program.

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