Imported footage (and audio) is slowed down during playback (18.12.1)

[JulianJD]

Ever since I have been using After Effects starting March this year, I'm having a problem with imported video footage and audio as well. When I preview the clip, the whole thing is slowed down including the audio. There's no lagging or freezing, but the entire clip just plays in slow-motion. I've made sure to check of the project and video frame rates match. Everything I've tried to fix this hasn't worked so far.

I'm running After Effects 18.12.1 on a 16-inch MacBook Pro with 2,3 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9 and 32GB of RAM. It also has an AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8 GB, but I don't believe AE uses that much. 20GB of the 32GB RAM is assigned to After Effects. 

Editing footage has been impossible so I would appreciate it a lot if someone here could help me out!

[Szalam · Accepted solution]

Couple of things:

1. Highly recommend you do NOT edit footage in After Effects. It is not built for that sort of thing. Premiere Pro is built for editing. After Effects is built for doing motion graphics, visual effects, and animation. Basically, it's for doing Effects After the edit. 😄

2. After Effects doesn't play back a video stream like an editing application does. It fully decompresses the video file to show you fully accurate pixel information. That is, it procces and then plays back every pixel in every frame. So, it has to cache a preview before you can plan it back in real time. The issue you're likely facing (without more information, this is my best guess), is that you're just watching it while it's caching the preview. While it's playing, you should see a green line appearing above the current time indicator in your timeline panel. The green areas are the cached frames. If you press 0 on your number pad or Shift+Space while it's building a preview, it'll play back through the frames that have already cached at real time. (Assuming everything is at the default settings in the preview panel.)

Does that help?

[JulianJD]

Hello Szalam, thanks for the quick and comprehensive reply. I normally use After Effects for animation only, but I'm experimenting with creating animations on top of video. The delay made it impossible to check the timing of the animations and also sound effects.

Your suggestion to use Shift+Space instead of just Space fixed the play back though! Both the footage and the audio play back normally now, so that did help a ton. Love it when there's a quick fix.

Thanks a lot!

[Szalam]

Glad to help!