Persistent problem with preview window

[Dominic31817785fjnz]

I've been trying to fix this problem for two days now and I urgently need a solution, please somebody help!

I open my project and scrub through the time line and everything seems to be ok, but the moment I add a new layer or change something in the composition, the preview pane freezes. Some particularly weird things then happen - if I pre-compse the composition, it begins to work again, but if I open the pre-comp to try and add things to it, the preview window flickers black and the frame is frozen.

if I have objects moving, I can see the frame of the object moving, but the actual preview is frozen.

I am running the After Effects 23.6.0 and I have just updated my GPU driver (RTX2060) on Windows 11

I have also tried booting up in Safe Mode and it still happens, and I have uninstalled and re-installed the app twice. In addition to this, I've tried changing the Audio Hardware option as I know this can cause issues and I have disabled the Harware Accelerator.

Please help as I have a deadline for this work approaching and I'm running out of ideas!

[jenkmeister]

Is it one particular project? Did this just happen after the GPU driver update? Can you roll back to the older driver to see if that might fix things? What's in the composition that is slowing things down? Which AE comp renderer (Classic/C4D) are you using? Any third-party plugins? 

[Dominic31817785fjnz]

It's not just one project. It's any project. They open up fine, but whenever I try and make a change to it, it freezes up. The problem started before the GPU update and persisted after the update. I also started AE up in Safe Mode to disable plugins and the problem persisted.

[jenkmeister]

Can you switch to Mercury Software mode if you're using Mercury GPU mode? Hard to know what is happening and your exact configuration to know what component might be causing this.

[shrayanka]

Hi Dominic318177fjnz,

Moving it to Discussions for troubleshooting.