After Effects stuck at initialzing mediacore for 1-3 minutes

I have this same problem. Sort of. I'm running After Effects 17.6.0 on 2019 MacPro (3.2 GHz 16-Core Xeon, 96GB 2933 MHz DDR4, OS 10.15.7). I've removed all plug-ins from the media core folder (I only had a few). Upon launching After Effects, I get a spinning beach ball while Media Core initializes. Eventually After Effects opens. Everything looks normal BUT I'm unable to play ram previews in realtime (it can only do 6 or 7 fps). If I quit After Effects, restart my computer, and relaunch After Effects, it will initialize Media Core quickly without a spinning beach ball. When that happens, After Effects works fine and I can playback ram previews in realtime. The quick load of media core is how I know After Effects will work ok. If I get a delay and spinning beach ball, it seems something has gone wrong with initializing media core - and the only result of whatever has gone wrong is that I can't play back previews in realtime. Again: nothing is in the Common/Plugins/7.0/MediaCore folder except the dummy.txt file. I've also reset preferences and re-installed After Effects and Adobe Media Encoder a few times. The problem I've described persists each time I uninstall and re-install.

Thanks for any troubleshooting tips! In order to keep up with my work-load, I keep restarting and re-installing and crossing my fingers to NOT see a beach ball when I start After Effects. Would love to solve whatever this issue is, though, because I miss my plug-ins!

Hi Criizon5E39,

Sorry for the crash issue.

There could be a plug-in in the MediaCore folder that's causing After Effects to crash. Go to the following location (depending on your OS) and remove all files and folders except dummy.txt.

Windows: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Common\Plug-ins\7.0\MediaCore

macOS: HD/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Plugins/7.0/MediaCore

Let us know if it helps.

Thanks,

Nishu