My video in AE is laggy and choppy

[cjk66372670]

Whenever I press the space bar and playback my video it turns out all choppy and laggy. I use After Effects CC 2018, on a Mac Book Pro. I know it is not trying to render the effects because from the moment I import it into a composition it's laggy. I edit for fun so I don't know much about my computer and about my settings on AE. I've looked up many videos and forums but none of them showed my problem.

If someone could just help me that'd be awesome.

Thanks.

[Dave_LaRonde]

Hit zero on the numeric keypad.  Wait a bit.  The preview will come.  This ain't a video editing application like Premiere Pro, and it doesn't work like one, either.

[cjk66372670]

It worked but still when I press the spacebar it's laggy.

[Kyle Hamrick · Accepted solution]

As Dave said, AE is not like an editing application - previews take time to build. Once the preview is built, it should play smoothly, but will be dependent on your Preview settings. It's possible, for example, to intentionally be skipping frames, previewing at lower resolutions, etc.

Open up your Preview panel and take a look at the settings. You can alter the preview settings per hotkey.

You can learn more about these settings here: Preview without rendering in After Effects

It sounds like you might also benefit from learning some of the basics of AE and how it works:
After Effects Help | After Effects User Guide

Good luck!

[cjk66372670]

Thank you! It worked! I really appreciate the help!!

[Kyle Hamrick]

Glad to hear it. Please mark the question as answered so it'll be helpful for others in the future. Thanks!

[Crex RS]

Thank you very much. Your advice worked more better than I expected. Thank you again 🙂

[savitarani0]

bro it did not worked for me

[briag95253585]

To fix my playback speed, i  opened after effects, clicked settings > media and disk cache  then u wanna empty disk cache and also clean databases and cache