Extremely slow video preview in After Effects CC 2022

[Safiya5CBB]

I have been running After Effects on an M1 Mac Mini with 16 gb of RAM. I had a lot of issues with playback of video content, which I use in combination with animated elements.

I just purchased a new macBook Pro with 64 gb of RAM, and to my surprise I am running into similar laggy performance when attempting to preview video. Even once the green bar renders, it is choppy and lags. Are my settings off somewhere? Or is this normal After Effects performance with video?

Thanks!

[Byron Cortez]

I'm assuming the new MacBook Pro is M1 Max, so I have to tell you that you may have to wait a bit for After Effects to be 100% compatible with ARM processors, it's not long now. However, it should not be excessively slow installed under Rosetta2. If you could give us the details of your clips, composition, effects, etc., then we will have a bigger picture to try to help you.

[Safiya5CBB]

I'm working with a 150 mb video file that plays for about 10 minutes. I have it smaller in the screen, with a mask cropping the edges, and a looped animated background that is simply semi transparent rectactanges floating back and forth. 

While I'm trying to preview this project, I'm using small workspaces which usually take at least a 3 minutes to playback a few seconds of video. Sometimes it's choppy playback, even with a fully green render bar at top. I'm wondering if I have some setting totally wrong. 

In addition to a lot of trouble with previewing, exporting this video file takes 3 minutes out of premiere, and my project is currently exporting out of after effects at an hour and a half and counting. 

[P.M.B]

Can't speak much to Mac Compatibility issues but one thing you can check is that your work space is trimmed so it's close to the number of frames/seconds you are trying to preview.  So trim your workspace bar to like 15 seconds or so, let it play through once laggy and when it loops for the second playthrough it might be better.  That works for me.  And of course you should be caching to a dedicated (preferebly SSD) drive other than the one AE and your OS are on.  Also make sure you have not allocated too much (or all) of your RAM for AE.  If you do AE will use it all leaving none for you OS which could also cause poor performance.