Participating Frequently

Question

Composition goes blank unless i zoom in (!)

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
August 29, 2021
4 replies
1877 views

I have a fairly small comp 200x64 pixels. 4 simple layers (2 shapes and 2 text layers). When I open the composition it goes completely blank... the funny thing is that if I zoom in it will appear on certain zooms (e.g. 400%)... but on most other zooms it goes completely blank.

For what it's worth, I have much larger comps with more complex layers that are working completely fine...

It's a very intermittent issue so I'm struggling to explain what I'm doing to trigger it. But it's happening 30-40% of the time so it's enough to really get in the way.

Also to confirm:

* Yes I made sure the layers are all visible (the eye icon)

* I made sure other comps where working before I recorded this video

Greatful for any support on this.

Screen_Recording_2021-08-29_at_6-18-20_pm.zip

ShiveringCactus

Community Expert

I spotted the comp window is set to Full rather than Auto. There might be a clue here. Have you cleared your cache recently? Does it recur if you have? I'm wondering if because it's set to Full, if the preview files used for most zooms have become corrupted, but not for the other zoom level.

viztasticAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thanks @Rick Gerard and @ShiveringCactus for the support.

@Scott Shasteen I've tried Auto and still no luck tbh. I've also tried clearing the cache on more than one occasion.

I have noticed when I make the comp size bigger it works perfectly fine. It's when the height is roughly less than 100px that the issue really kicks in.

Also @Rick Gerard in the second video I have a vide of the layer structure, but I've also included a screenshot here incase it helps. Can assure you the layers aren't white... I've just set the composition background to white (in comp settings).

nishu_kush

Community Manager

Hi viztastic,

Could you install the After Effects beta version and see if it works better? After Effects team has fixed a similar issue in the latest beta build.

Let us know the result.

Thanks,

Nishu

R

Rick Gerard

Community Expert

I understand the need for a small comp. I was just making a suggestion.

I see no problems with any of my systems. Just tried a 100 X 30 comp. Your screen recording doesn't show the layer structure. It looks like it's possibly a white shape layer with a black shape layer, with a text layer on top with very small and thin (less than one-pixel thick lines) characters. I can't get a comp like that to fail.

Have you tried turning off hardware acceleration for the UI in the preferences or changing the GPU acceleration in the Project settings? What are your OS, system specs, and AE version?

R

Rick Gerard

Community Expert

You have not explained why you need a comp that is so small. I would probably make the com at least 4 times that big and scale it down for rendering.

If you need to end up with really big pixels there are other ways to accomplish the task.

viztasticAuthor

Participating Frequently

Tbh I'm not sure I needed to explain why I needed a comp that small.

I'm creating a UI animation. The layers are all vectors/shapes so they scale fine when they feed up into other comps.

My animations are entirely procedural/shape based so there hasn't been a need to artificially create bigger comps... unless there's an After Effects bug that's going to force me into that.

viztasticAuthor

Participating Frequently

Just to avoid this becoming a distraction, the project is an Interaction Design piece... so we're intentionally staying pixel perfect to help developers build to scale later... it's all feeding in from Illustrator UI designs so it's important we keep everything to scale to avoid people having to do unnecessary maths to scale/up down implementations.

Jose Panadero

Community Expert

Try to deactivate GPU acceleration. Go to File > Project Settings. Under the Video Rendering and effects tab select Mercury software only.

viztasticAuthor

Participating Frequently

Hi @Jose Panadero thanks so much for the swift support!

I tried it but no luck (also I did try restarting after effects).

I've attached another screen recording showing what I did.

Also for context I'm running a MacBook pro on Big Sur (2.6 Ghz i7, 32 gig ram) with Radeon Pro 560X 4GB graphics.

Screen_Recording_2021-08-29_at_8-26-38_pm.zip

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded