spacebar won't play back preview

[briannam2005]

For a while I had After Effects cc 2018 and experienced no issues, until about 7 months into having it. I'm not sure what I did to cause this issue but whenever I pressed the spacebar on my mac to toggle playback of my preview, it would switch to the hand tool, and wouldn't play my preview no matter what. It didn't matter if I held or just pressed the spacebar, it would toggle between the pointer and hand tool. I even tried assigning a new shortcut in the preview pannel and just using the play button, but to no prevail. I uninstalled cc 2018 and switched to cc 2019, thinking that it might have just been a bug in the system I was using. For a month or so things went smoothly but a few days ago the same problem started up again. It's crucial that I'm able to use ae since it's my way of earning money. If anyone can help me please reply!

[Jose Panadero]

You can assign another key for playback in the Preview panel, for example, you can use the "0" on your numbers keypad to playback the work area range. If you have tried with different software versions and that does not solve your problem, maybe the problem is in the keyboard, have you tried with another keyboard? Another thing that you could try is to delete the After Effects preferences file. Hold CTRL+ALT+SHIFT as soon as you open After Effects and you will be prompted to delete the preferences file.

[briannam2005]

i have a macbook pro so i cant switch keyboards nor can i use the "0" on the numbers keypad. I will try the prefrences thing tho, thank you!

[briannam2005]

i opened after effects to try and delete the preferences file but that didn't work either. Do you possibly know a service number I can call to ask about my problem?

[Jose Panadero]

You can use CTRL+0 to preview your composition. The phone number depends on your country, enter into adobe.com to check the support options.

[briannam2005]

I'm from the United States, are you aware of what the numer would be? I tried calling one of the numbers on the Adobe website but it said that I couldn't get support over the phone for After Effects.

[Peru Bob]

There is no phone support for After Effects.

Go here:

Contact Customer Care

and

[emik79372412]

Hi, were you able to figure out and fix this issue? I'm having the same problem as well, and from what I can tell from my Google search, so are a lot of other people but nobody seems to have an answer. 

My problem is the same as yours except in addition, when I try to close out of AE after this starts happening the entire system freezes. I have to use Task Manager to quit AE. And lately, even when I open up my project file, the problem is happening right off the bat, I can't even play it once. If you or anyone else has any insight to this problem, it'd be much appreciated! 🙂 

[tristansummers]

I hope somebody finds out what triggers this soon! 

CAn't think of any reason why AE suddenly won't allow itself to stop playing

[jacksneogen]

I'm having the same issue. Started a few days ago. AE will playback using the spacebar one minute, and then not the next. Did the reset preferences thing and that doesn't seem to help. Maybe time to uninstall and reinstall??

[tristansummers]

Have been advised to check audio output is the same as default system. Also try closing waveforms in the timeline. This neeeeeds fixing , as we nee dto be able to choose our audio hardware independantly of wider system. try changing audio settings. I was working with 44hz wavs from VO artists as they can never supply 48hz no matter how many times you ask for them

[jacksneogen]

Hi. Thanks for the idea. Unfortunately, it didn't work for me. It seems that just this one project is corrupt, as other ones I'm opening work fine. Sadly, using the dependencies option, collecting files and copying them into a new project doesn't help. Still stumped.

[EmiliaAU]

I have this problem too, whenever I play the ram preview, after a few minutes it stops working, and can only be reset if I purge memory, but only fixes the issue for another few minutes. Restarting my PC and After Effects does not seem to help either

[jacksneogen]

I ended up identifying two pre-comps that were causing the issue. When I deleted them and rebuilt using single layers, it worked fine. What's odd is that the same two pre-comps appear about 15 seconds earlier in the same timeline and work fine. Not sure why, but after 4 hours, I'm back at work. Thanks to all.

[jereben]

One trick that works for me, whenever the space bar seemingly randomly stops playing back:
Go to Edit > Preferences > Audio Hardware, change your "Default Output" and click OK.
For some reason, the space bar works again after that...

[Napolitano Homes5F93]

This worked like a charm. Thanks jereben...

[연호5C81]

Wow! Wonderful! This was a real solution. Thank you!

[erics2020]

THANK YOU!

[schroekerf50442275]

It happened after I cleaned cache in preference. 

Problem was solved after I restarted AE.

[angelina1244]

Have you found a fix to this yet? I've been working on an edit and was almost finished until it started doing this and now I can only play the video for like 1 second until it does this 😔

[daniell2678229]

I had the same problem and managed to fix it by clearing my disk cache and RAM memory after restarting AE. Worth trying if you're still stuck. Preferences > Media & Disk Cache>Empty Disk Cache. To clear the RAM too, Edit > Purge > All Memory & Disk Cache.

[hmmm5C1E]

omg thank you finally I can work on my edit- I'll keep this in mind if it does it again

[femis38104987]

i also have the same problem went through all the comments and the solution proferred but couldnt solve it in my own case. i purge all the memory (Edit-Purge-All Memeory & Disk Cache....) it didnt work. Empty disk Cache and Clean Database and Cache (Edit-Preferences-Media & Disk Cache), still didnt work.
What I did was that i ressaigned the shortcut to numpad 0 which worked for me. but i discovered that i could play the preview with numpad 0 and still pause with spacebar. Then i saw a reset button beside Preview and reassigned by shortcut to Spacebar and eveything was solved. I hope this is helpful to someone out there?

[MLilla777]

I'm having the same problem. I did several tutorials, just to see if they would play with the space bar, and no problem, but when I try to create a file, myself, I can't play it with the space bar, and none of these solutions work.  

[tristansummers]

It's an issue with premiere as well and restarting often fixes it. Often just toggling between applications can fix it. Suspects include audio or decklink or usb or midi, control surface etc. drivers conflict, ram or cache issues. Whatever goes wrong, space bar dies first. Get a full size keyboard and use numpad0.