Display tearing issues in CS6

[pkroll]

Hi all,

I'm experiencing some wierd display tearing issues in After Effects CS 6.

Anything which moves moderately quickly in the composition window during playback or interaction experiences severe horizontal image tearing.

Video playback is tearing, regardless of resolution size (full, quarter, etc.). The display tears EVEN when I am simply dragging stuff around. I could be holding down space and dragging the canvas around in my composition window, or just dragging a footage element and I'll see a ton of really severe, jagged tearing.

It definitely looks like a monitor refresh rate issue, but I've never experienced anything like it before on this system.

Turning off hardware acceleration for composition, layer and footage has not helped. I have also restarted numerous times after changing this setting.

I am running a MacPro 2.66 GHz Quad-Core, OS X 10.7.3

16 gb ram

Card: ATI Radeon HD 4870 512 MB

My graphics card is admitedly not a supported card, but it has always worked fine in CS 5.5, and I would imagine that it would simply be ignored when I have turned off hardware acceleration, and it is not supported to begin with. I have had NO issues in any other version of AE, or in any other applications including FCP, Photoshop, etc.

I have two monitors on this machine, both standard computer displays and not broadcast, blackmagic, firewire or anything like that. One is an Apple monitor, and the other Samsung. One is connected via mini-display port adaptor.

This issue occurs on either monitor.

Any advice? Thanks so much!

[Felix Mack]

I get a bad case of the tearing on my mac 2.8 Quad Core ATI RADEON HD 5770 as well.

[natevplas]

Hi Kevin.  Can I assume there is no noteworthy progress on this bug after at least a month?  I'm having this issue on my new Mac Pro 12 core and it practically makes the program unusable.  I have filed a bug report.

[ViperJPB]

Any update to the progress of fixing this bug? I would really love to start using AE CS6 in my broadcast work but this tearing is just way too annoying. Thanks.

[davidp158]

Still no news on this after 3 months???

[natevplas]

It looks like Adobe has either given up on this problem or it's just not a priority for them.  For all those who haven't, please file a bug report and maybe we can get their attention.

[Guest]

I don't know if this is the same problem that I was having, but I was experiencing tearing issues as well.  I found out AE CS6 was not reading my footage correctly.  It saw my progressive footage as interlaced, which was causing the tearing.  When I went to Menu->Interpret Footage, and set it to progressive frames, the problem went away.  Now I had to do that with every piece of footage I imported (progressive or interlaced, which is a pain and something Adobe need to fix), but if you shift-click all your footage, you can interpret footage en masse.  It's doesn't fix the problem (AE not seeing the footage correctly), but it's a possible workaround.

BTW Adobe, this is also a problem I'm finding in Premiere Pro as well.

[davidp158]

jhawkgrad,

The problem some of us experience, myself included, is this display tearing effect with not only footage, but animated solids and text. For sure, if your source video isn't properly interpreted, that would cause display issues, but I don't think that's the issue here.

[Guest]

I'm having the same problem on my AE CS6.  It's on a Windows 7 64-bit.  All video is having this problem except 24p footage.  When I tell it to re-interprate the 60i interlaced footage (in this case lower-field interlaced to progressive), the footage looked perfect.  However, when I changed it back, the footage would not go jagged again.  It's like AE couldn't read the footage right until you tell it to interpret it.  Then all is good.  Don't know if anyone else is experiencing this.

[Julien_deka]

Lion 10.7.4 on a Mac Pro 4,1 - AE CS6 (still in trial mode) - GTX570

same issue here.

[pkroll]

Hey Kevin,

Please see my reply in the other thread -- unfortunately the issue occurs without any kind of media involved at all.

[Jesper_Frydenlund]

Any progress on this issue?

It is driving me N-U-T-S-!

[jwalkwalk]

Try opening the package contents of AE (right click AE icon and click "show package contents") then go to the contents folder and add the name of your video card to the intel_ogl_supported_cards.txt document. Worked for me.

[davidp158]

jwalkwalk - Can you advise if this applies to Mac users and the ATI Radeon HD 5870 video card? If so, do I just enter the text "ATI Radeon HD 5870" into the intel_ogl_supported_cards.txt file?

[hammo93]

i have same issue on CS6 but have also discovered that it is a problem specific to the Radeon HD6750 on my macbook pro.  When i switch to

the Intel Graphics HD3000 card the tearing stops.  Tearing is also better on 5.5 but is still there.

[Filmhooligan8]

I am having this problem on 3 separate machines since the upgrade to Mountain Lion. We have 3 machines that are 2x2.4 GHz 6-core Intel Xeons, all with ~30gb of memory and dual ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024mb graphics cards, besides one that has an NVIDIA FeForce 8800 GT 512mb as the secondary graphics card.

During an extremely basic linear keyframe with a .jpg and a solid, along with a couple simple backgrounds we ran into this issue on every single machine. We never saw this problem until we upgraded machines and graphics cards.

Has anyone found any fixes for Mac machines running Mountain Lion?

Thanks in advance

[Todd_Kopriva]

We've isolated the problem to an issue with how Mac OS deals with vertical sync and OpenGL. We are working on a fix.

[pkroll]

Todd, that is excellent news. Thanks very much for the update. I think we were all worried that Adobe had forgotten about this.

Do you have a rough idea how long we might wait for the fix?

[Todd_Kopriva]

No, I can't comment on that.

[Jesper_Frydenlund]

That is really good news.

I expect it to be ready when I get back from lunch

[aschmitt6]

Great news!! Thank you.

[davidp158]

Good news is that Adobe has located the problem. Great news will be when they fix it.

FWIW, I am glad that Adobe has acknowledged the problem, but wonder why it has taken this long to only get this far.

[Jean-Paul de Win]

Any news on this fix yet? We're 3 months further...

[davidp158]

I was optimistic that Adobe would have jumped on this issue right away. Silly me. Maybe it will be a Creative-Cloud-crowd-only fix...LOL.

[Filmhooligan8]

The issue still exists even within Creative Cloud, CC is just a difference in licensing, not different software. However there is a fix: don't use Mountain Lion. We have taken 14 Mac Pros down to 10.7.4 and the issue is totally gone. For any of the newer Mac Pros that can't downgrade because Mountain Lion is built into the hardware we are burning down to 10.6, upgrading to 10.6.8, and then going to 10.7. Apple has very specifically told me that they do not support this, however it's something to consider if the problem really kills your ability to work.

[davidp158]

Filmhooligan - Thanks for your post and suggestions. 

I still wonder why the CS6 AE problem is due to Mountain Lion when I don't experience that problem with CS5.5 and Mountain Lion.