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KilianWolffgrammWS
Participant
April 29, 2021
Answered

After Effects 2021 is not able to handle H264 footage

  • April 29, 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 292 views

I have been using AE 2020 for quite a while now and aside from the usual issues it had it worked pretty great. My coworkers have switched to the latest version so that we can stay up-to-date and I decided to do that too since we want to be able to work in each others projects.

I imported a 2 minutes clip that I wanted to track that just appears as a green image with a bunch of dots, my coworker has the same issue and we thought it was a hardware problem (CPU, RAM, GPU).

But we quickly found out that doing the exact same thing in AE 2020 does not show any issues whatsoever, so the software is just bugged.. again.

Has anyone had this same issue and found a fix for it? Or is Adobe planning to resolve this somehow?

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Jose Panadero

You can deactivate video acceleration preview on you After Effects preferences to avoid green previews. It is not a problem in AE but also with the correct graphics card driver. Enter into Preferences > Import and decativate hardware acceleration preview for video files. Then go to Edit > Purge > All memory and disk Cache and restart After Effects. This should solve your green preview problem.

2 replies

Jose Panadero
Community Expert
Jose PanaderoCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
April 29, 2021

You can deactivate video acceleration preview on you After Effects preferences to avoid green previews. It is not a problem in AE but also with the correct graphics card driver. Enter into Preferences > Import and decativate hardware acceleration preview for video files. Then go to Edit > Purge > All memory and disk Cache and restart After Effects. This should solve your green preview problem.

    R
    ReverbMike
    Participant
    April 30, 2021

    Thank you very much Jose. That worked for me. I have several very expensive GPUs, when will I get to use hardware acceleration again? Do I have to build a new computer to use hardware acceleration? I might not be able to tell the difference. Thanks for your help. 👍

    Jose Panadero
    Community Expert
    Jose PanaderoCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    April 30, 2021

    The only thing you have done is to deactivate hardware accelerated preview for decoding video not for the rest of the gpu accelerated elements. I suggest you to not to use MP4 containers as getting green lines is a common problem in some circumstances. What you can do is to transcode them into Quicktime ProRes or DNX and you can activate the hardware acceleration for decoding video again. Not sure where the problem resides but a bad combination of OS-Adobe-Graphics Drivers is creating the green preview problems for all of us. If I transcode videos into Quicktime ProRes or DNX that problem dissapears for me. Not sure if any other colleague here in the forum use this method but avoiding MP4 containers specifically if the are encoded in H264 results in AE running perfectly if you have activated the hardware accelerated decoding.

    R
    ReverbMike
    Participant
    April 29, 2021

    yeah... my videos look great in AE 2016, AE 2017, AE 2018, AE 2019 & AE 2020...  AE 2021 green. wtf? Some videos work if I simply change them from .mp4 or .mov to .mpg... but I'm not changing a thousand clips... sticking with 2020 for now.

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