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T
teoblar
Participant
June 20, 2023
Question

Extremely Slow RAM Previews

  • June 20, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 652 views

Hello, Community.  I am having a slowly degenerating (over the last few months) performance issue with AE RAM previews.  It has gotten to the point where I can't edit or playback pre-rendered green bar content at all.  It's almost 1 frame per second of playback speed, no effects at 12x12 quality.  I want to check if there are settings that I am missing before blaming my hardware.  Would hate to scrap my overbuilt laptop.

 

AE 23.5.0 with stock settings, no pluggins, Lenovo P73, Win 11 Pro (fully updated), i9-9880 @ 2.30GHz, Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 (fresh driver), 128gb ram, 2tb SSD C: drive (software), 2tb SSD data drive (footage storage).  100GB disk cache at C:\Users\name\AppData\Local\Temp, Conformed Media Cache at C:\Users\name\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Common

 

Purging disk cache, restarting AE and rebooting PC no longer seems to have any effect.  The worst offending project is made up of 4K .MOV footage, 94549kbps data rate but the problem haunts me with other projects to a slightly lesser extent.

 

All 16 CPU cores hold steady at 90% while trying to generate a RAM preview, either by command or as an automatic idle process, then drop to about 30% during playback, which again isn't any faster than the generation stage.  I'm not taxing my GPU or RAM in the least.  Hoping that I may be missing a setting somewhere that would explain why this beefy machine has been brought to it's knees.

 

Thanks in advance for any ideas!    

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

D
David Arbor
Inspiring
June 21, 2023

Can you confirm if multi-frame rendering is enabled in the prefs? If so, then it could be your GPU driver. I've heard of a few folks having issues with the most recent Nvidia driver. Rolling back to the previous Studio driver or two might help. Even if you're not taxing your GPU, the driver can still have a massive impact on interactive performance and "drawing" the UI and your image.

T
teoblarAuthor
Participant
June 21, 2023

Thanks for the input, David.  That is exactly the kind of help I need to narrow this down.  Multi-frame rendering was on with 10% CPU reserved for other tasks.  I turned it off, purged everything, rebooted and relaunched the project; no change in performance.  

 

For what its worth, the project file size is 14.5mb and this issue has spanned the last three video card driver updates and a migration from Win10 to Win11.  The increasing frequency and severity of this situation makes me feel like I have some hardware failure in my machine, but I don't know enough about computers to understand if mother boards 'degrade', per say.

Thanks again for any help out there! 

D
David Arbor
Inspiring
June 21, 2023

You're welcome. This stuff can be really hard to diagnose. Definitely keep Multi-frame rendering turned on as that will give you a huge performance gain. 

Motherboards don't degrade, they catastrophically die, so you're good there.

a 14.5 MB file is pretty large, so to me that says you're either using a lot of Warp Stabilizer (that data is actually saved in the project file) or a lot of shape layers. There are other things that can make a large .aep, but is it one of these two? 

 

Is this project the only one with the issue? Try using the new Composition Profiler to see if your bottleneck stands out: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/composition-profiler.html

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