Comp viewer stuck on "New Composition" and "New Composition From Footage", playback not working

[AmberUG]

I just installed After Effects for the first time on this (new) computer, but I cannot get the composition viewer to work. It's stuck on the buttons "New Composition" and "New Composition From Footage", but I cannot click on them. The issue is very similar to this post Comp Viewer stuck showing "New Composition", but the suggested solution did not change anything.

If I double click on some footage in the project panel, the buttons disappear but the composition viewer remains black.

Hitting the play button or spacebar doesn't work either. The "Current Time Indicator" does not move and just shows a red line (see image).

I had the same issue in Premiere, which I managed to fix by disabling hardware acceleration and setting video rendering and playback to "software only". Sadly, that doesn't seem to fix my issues with After Effects.

I have tried:

- Unchecking "Hardware Accelerate Composition, Layer, and Footage Panels" in display preferences

- Unchecking "Enable Disk Cache" in media & disk cache preferences

- Changing device class and default output in the audio hardware preferences

- Unplugging my headphones

- Setting "video rendering and effects" to use "Mercury Software Only" in project settings

- Installing previous versions (18.0 and 18.4.1)

- Running as administrator

- Unplugging second monitor

- Switching to a different workspace

- Resetting preferences with the alt button

- Restarting my computer

Since Premiere runs very smoothly, I doubt that my hardware is the issue. But these are my specs:

Dell Latitude 7320 CTO

Windows 10
M.2 512GB PCIe NVMe Class 35 SSD
i5-1145G7 vPro, Intel Iris XE Graphics, 16GB Memory

[nishu_kush · Accepted solution]

Hi AmberUG,

Welcome to the community and sorry for your issue.

Outdated Intel GPU driver could cause this issue. Would you mind letting us know the version that's installed on your computer? Here's how you can find: https://support.viewsonic.com/en/support/solutions/articles/33000221571-how-to-check-graphics-card-d... 

Do not rely on Windows to update the driver. I'd suggest downloading it from the Intel website and then install.

Let us know if it helps.

Thanks,

Nishu

[AmberUG]

Hi Nishu, 

Thanks for your reply. You were absolutely correct. I believed Windows when it told me the drivers were up to date, but it turned out there were updates it hadn't found! So far things seem to be working as they should, what a relief!