After Effects can't even play a normal video

[Guest]

I rarely use After Effects to do serious effects, which is how I know something is not right...

Using Keylight on a clip and trying to watch it is painful... AE can't key something and play it back to save it's life.

OK, but the smoking gun is the play below which when I playback with no effects, After Effects still can't play!

How can this program be effective when it can't play back one h.264 video play all by itself!

Any video player on Earth can do things After Effects can't... I will sometimes hit the space bar 4 times or so just to get the timeline to start to play before it lags and freezes after a few seconds.

So After Effects can't play one layer... it's unusable! How can anyone accurately create effects and preview their timing in After Effects?

It's not possible; even simple compositing with a green screen and video underneath has the program stretched to it's limits,

ONE layer of h.264 video has the program stretched to it's limit!!!!!

What does Adobe have to say for itself? I know ACPs on here will tell me to re-encode all my footage all day long (Adobe like footage containers no one uses, it's a big secret on here apparently). This is one h.264 clip about 4 minutes long... After Effects cannot play the layer without lags and freezes.

Anyone know of a free program that works better than AE? It has to be out there.

[P.M.B]

FAQ: What information should I provide when asking a question on this forum?

[Guest]

A much better question would be what system specs are required for Adobe After Effects to be able to play a simple video... what does that take?

A processor that isn't out yet? the i12 15 core?

4 graphics cards, or is it 5 graphics cards?

the source video I'm using for this isn't even 4K

[Dave Merchant]

After Effects is not, has never been and never will be a non-linear editor. If you want real-time playback and scrubby tools, edit in Premiere Pro - but if you want extremely complex calculated effects and compositing, you live with the fact it takes more than 1/30th of a second to compute each frame. Use RAM Preview, or render a test file.

[Dave_LaRonde]

Know this -- AE can not play ANY kind of video.  Video editing application can.  A viewer can.  Not AE.  That's because AE is not MEANT to play things.  It's an effects, compositing and motion graphics application.  It's meant to do very different things.  To view a limited amount of video, you have to PREVIEW.

If you want to have some success in AE, I recommend you learn about the basics:

After Effects tutorials | Learn how to use After Effects CC

Blow 'em off at your peril.