Client Preview in After Effects

I'm running After Effects ver.8 (CS3) on a nearly new 2.93 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Mac with 6GB RAM. I'm using an AJA ioHD for output to my broadcast monitors. I'm primarily a Final Cut Pro/Avid editor and am back on a rather large AE project after a few years hiatus other than doing minor animated type overlays and such for import back into my editing program.
The project is a little over 2 minutes and has dozens of layers - mostly type, photos and vector files. Very little footage-wise. My question is how to preview the entire 2 minute project at high quality for my clients who are behind me. Is there any way to just render it out in the timeline like you would in FCP or Avid and play it? I can preview sections of it or I can do the whole thing at half-res or skipping frames. I know that I can render out a movie to the finder and then import it back into FCP, but I would think that AE now has a way to render it and just hit "play" in the timeline.
Is there a way to do this? Or should I be getting more throughput with 6GB of RAM? Are my scratch disk settings maybe wrong?
Thanks in advance,
Eddie

No, no and no (mostly). RAM previews are the only way to get guaranteed realtime playback and prevciewing 2 minutes at a time is simply impossible with a 32bit app that can only address 4GB of RAM such as AE is. Sorry, you are really out of luck on that one. The only thing you can do is to try and use the disk cache. Cached frames may play fast enough from disk, if they are fast enough, but there is no guarantees, either. Also note, that AE will weigh your processor performanceagainst the disk performance, so if it thinks it can calculate something faster than read it from disk, it will not cache. Inm addition, caching realyl only takes off if the project is structured accordingly, meaning there are sub-comps that can be cached and are not invalidated with every small change in teh parent comp.
Mylenium

Similar Messages

Interlace RAM-Preview in After Effects?

Hi :-)
I'm working with 1080i50 Video-Footage (Interlace)...
And I'm searching for a possibility to get a "real" Interlace-Preview in After Effects with an external video card (for example Intensity Pro)...
If I play out the RAM-Preview I only get a progressiv-Preview and the Interlace-Fields are visible...
What can I do to get a correct Interlace-Preview from After Effects?
(I use Adobe After Effects CC 2014, iMac, Intensity Pro)
And by the way, Interlace is still STANDARD, I can't use 1080p50 because this is not a compatible Standard for a Video BluRay...
Who can help me?

I have done AFX work with my 25i material, you just have to make sure the field order box is checked when exporting.

Preview in After Effects CS6

Hi After Effects community, I have a problem here, in my After Effects CS6, in the preview, has these colored blocks, I can't delete, is a problem of After Effects CS6? please help me, Thanks.

Thank very much!! master ! I can continue now, thank you!!

Extending Render preview in After Effects CC

I have a brand new iMac 27". I've googled to the best of my ability how to extend the render preview. Enabling cache has done nothing. changing the resolution as done nothng. Reducing the quality of the preview has done nothing, in fact it doesn't matter if it's full quality. It stops rendering the preview 100 frames into a 60 second comp. Any help is greatly apreciated.

http://forums.adobe.com/community/aftereffects_general_discussion
This forum is actually about the Cloud as delivery, not about using individual programs
If you start at the Forums Index http://forums.adobe.com/index.jspa
You will be able to select a forum for the specific Adobe product(s) you use
Click the "down arrow" symbol on the right (where it says ALL FORUMS) to open the drop down list and scroll

After effects & Adobe Bridge preview Issue *freezing*

Hello all,
I wanted to begin learning After Effects CS4, unfortunately Adobe Bridge CS4 is halting my education.
If I explore any kind of After effects CS4 preset, and preview it inside of Adobe bridge, my pc freezes. The preview window, within Bridge CS4 turns blank white while it freezes,
the Windows toolbar of Adobe bridge, says not responding temporarily, if a wait a little while around 30-45 seconds I regain control of my pc again, the preview box occasionally will show a still image and sometimes it will stay white or flicker. If I do wait the 30-45 seconds the toolbar window no longer says 'not responding' I can click to a (non) After effects preset folder, (for example) 'My family pictures' and it will operate normally but if I go back to the After effects CS4 presets again the freezing will occur once more.
What I find strange is that Adobe Bridge previewing, works absolutely fine for my photoshop documents, Illustrator documents, and any Jpeg photos I have, all after effect presets fail to preview, regardless of type if it's a still shape background or animated sprite, the same freeze issue occurs
I was wondering if anyone has helpful tips?
so far I have downloaded all important driver updates for my graphics card, my card is a nVidia GeForce 7900 GS 256, I have also reinstalled bridge and AfterEffects, I have downloaded all the relevent players.
I am a Windows vista user, also I have enough RAM I believe, just over 3 Giga
I dont know how useful the info is on my Pc spec is, but I thought it could be worth mentioning.
I have looked for a few hours to find some kind of thread with a similar problem I have been unsuccessful, I hope someone can help
Kindest regards Julian

Hi Curt y,
I do have the latest Quicktime player installed, I would'nt have have thought that would halt me previewing CS4 after effect still shapes and backgrounds? but.. I'm not to sure if I'm honest.
well I tried uninstalling and reinstalled my player still no sucess sadly.
do you know roughly what date all these old threads popped up?
I'm going to scavenge for them anyway in the the hope I find something useful. *must be positive*
thank you Curt y, for giving me some of your time.
regards Julian

I can't get text effects to preview in cs6 After Effects. It was working a week ago.

I can't get text effects to preview in After Effects CS6 browser. It was working a week ago.

I uninstalled and reinstalled a current Quicktime. Couldn't find hardware accelerated previews in Bridge setting. Is it under "preferences"? Couldn't find it in preferences. Still not previewing.

After Effects CC sluggish "Fast Preview" playback

Hello,
I've recently upgraded from After Effects 5.5 to CC. I've found CC to be very sluggish in many ways, from using the interface itself, to scrolling down my layers using the mouse wheel, to not being able to get realtime playback once I spacebar preview a bit of my timeline.
None of these things were or are issues with After Effects 5.5 which I still have installed thankfully.
My main question is about space bar previewing (foreground memory) bits of your timeline in CC. (Not ram preview)
In After Effects 5.5, it didn't matter how complex my project was, if I hit spacebar to preview it would slowly preview and load, you could see the green render line building, as soon as I was happy I could scrub the rendered green area and if I hit spacebar at any point in the rendered area, After Effects would playback realtime.
This is very important to me because when dealing with little intricate key framing it's nice to be able to playback a given spot within the rendered green area and get realtime playback instantly.
This is impossible to do in CC, it doesn't matter if I spacebar preview or RAM preview an area. When I scrub the green rendered area and hit spacebar to get realtime playback it will never manage to playback at full framerate. The only way to do this is to RAM preview but that defeats the purpose because you have to keep adjusting the work area bar, and it's just not the same as spacebar previewing which gives you more freedom and you don't have to wait for the RAM preview to kick in.
Is their any work around for this? and is their any plans to fixing the general sluggishness of After Effects CC?
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Many Thanks,
Jakub
I'm running
Mac Pro
2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Ceon
32GB DDR3
ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB
OS X 10.8.2 (Mountain Lion)

Hey Szalam,
I'm on Mountain Lion, the sluggish interaction occurs with or without multiprocessing enabled, my cache is set to 100GB, my composition's are always set to standard classic renderer. Again I also have CS5.5 installed simultaneously and it runs lightning fast in comparison just with default settings. But to be clear, this is not a complaint about actual rendering to file but of not having realtime spacebar preview and the general sluggishness of the UI interaction.
The benefit of realtime spacebar preview is you can preview yourself a little section of timeline and work within that area in almost realtime. If you make a small keyframe adjustment then the green preview line only breaks in that tiny section and it only takes half a second to spacebar render it again, then once you hit stop, the scrub line stay exactly at that frame.
Not having it playback in realtime really does slowdown the process and as Coolbaboon said, it forces you to work in a less intuitive manner.
Again if theirs any current workaround I'm all ears. In the meantime I hope this will be fixed as part of the big overhaul hopefully coming soon. Realtime spacebar preview and a way more responsive UI, like 5.5 had.

After Effects CS6 RAM preview seems to now be broken after 11.0.2.12 update

Updated to the latest patch for AE CS6 11.0.2.12.
When I hit RAM Preview, my After Effects just locks up, or has an enormous (minutes) delay if I have multi-processor rending turned on. Info says it is working on background processes.
In fact, if I am using Trapcode Form or Particular and multiprocessor turned on it tends to crash. Since upgrading the version I can't even render that start of a particular scene.
Is anyone else having an issue with this? I have tried it on another workstation in the office and it does exactly the same thing.
My machine is an HP Workstation Z800, Windows 7 64bit, 18Gb Ram, Xeon [email protected] and Nvidia Quadro 5000.

Yes. when using Particular 2.1 I find that if I have MP turned ON it takes forever to set up the processes. Getting out of the MP mode at that point is difficult but possible. Once MP is off everything renders great.
I have no other issues with any operations in the CS6 suite.
This happens on a HP Z820 with all current software/drivers.

After Effects CC 2014 (13.0, 13.1, 13.1.1) and Yosemite RAM preview probleme

"We are aware of one issue regarding RAM preview in After Effects on Mac OSX v10.10: When a RAM preview begins to play, the first several frames of the video will not play the first time through; subsequent loops through the same RAM preview duration will play all frames."
when will it be repaired? in the next update?
thanks

paulo freitas wrote:
"We are aware of one issue regarding RAM preview in After Effects on Mac OSX v10.10: When a RAM preview begins to play, the first several frames of the video will not play the first time through; subsequent loops through the same RAM preview duration will play all frames."
when will it be repaired? in the next update?
They have said that it is set to be fixed in the next update. Which should be within the month, if I'm not misremembering.
EDIT: I was misremembering. It is an issue that they're aware of, but are still working with Apple to try to find the source of the problem and, thus, the fix.

Details of video preview with Mercury Transmit in the 2014 update to After Effects CC

In the 2014 update to After Effects CC, which is available today, the technology used for video preview on an external monitor has been replaced with Mercury Transmit technology from Premiere Pro. Read about it in detail here:
http://bit.ly/AE_video_preview
Please post in this thread to discuss or ask questions about these changes.
Read about all of the other changes coming to the 2014 update to After Effects CC here:
http://bit.ly/AE_CC_next_details

Jef,
It's your choice if you wish to use Mercury Transmit with your AJA cards, or the AJA Preview plug-in. You do not need to uninstall anything, but you should disable the one you are not using.
The differences between the two are subtle, but can be simplified (very grossly simplified) to speed vs. accuracy.
The AJA Preview plug-in has a performance advantage over Mercury Transmit. AJA is able to optimize the frame throughput because they have better access to their hardware. You should be able to get real-time previews under most circumstances.
Mercury Transmit has better access to the After Effects pixel buffer than the AJA Preview plug-in. For example, when color management is enabled in the project, Mercury Transmit will apply color transforms. These color transforms require additional processing, which can slow down the preview speed and drop it below real-time.
Performance of video preview in After Effects (any version, using any of the available technologies) otherwise tends to be a straightforward equation of the computer's processor horsepower vs. the requirements of the frames being pushed (frame size + frame rate + color depth + color management). In the "performance of RAM preview when video preview is enabled" section of this page, I've detailed what levers you can pull to affect the performance of video preview in After Effects:
http://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2014/05/video-preview-mercury-transmit-after-effects.h tml
If you continue to have problems, please post more detail about the settings you are using, especially whether you are using greater than 8-bpc color or color management in the project. Machine specs and the state of the machine, including the amount of RAM, free RAM, and other applications running, will also be helpful. Please also state, given all of the above, what frame rate is being reported in the Info panel during RAM preview playback.

Sound in after effects?

For some reason, sound layers do not preview in after effects. Does anyone know why and how I could change that?

Start by reading these two FAQ entries:
How can I play or preview sound (audio)?
Why is there no audio (sound) in my output file?
Answer back regarding whether these addressed your issue. If not, we can help further.

After effects takes too long to render, broadcasting time is soon, so I'm in a lot of trouble!!! :(

Hello!
I started to render a pretty easy animation 13 days ago.
The animation is 4.30 minutes long, and there's no 3d involved. Only illustrations from Illustrator and some textures.
After these 13 days of rendering, and finishing 4 minutes, it felt like crashing. So it did.
This animation is for Belgian television (broadcasting time is soon), along with 20 more, so I am in deep deep trouble.
I use my mac pro, from a seagate hard drive.
> codec apple prores hq (this is what the company wants)
Could really use help to solve this problem!!
Thanks a lot
Ellen

Hi!
I agree, something is very wrong with your scene or setup. I would recommend the following actions:
1. Make a RAM preview in After Effects, in full resolution. If you have layers with frame blending or motion blur, make sure to enable the frame blending and motion blur boxes in the top of the timeline so that it shows up in the preview. Also, check the Preview settings window and make sure that no frames are skipped and that it renders in full resolution.
If the RAM preview is rendered as slowly as your final render, then the problem is inside of after effects or with your source files. If the RAM preview is a lot faster than the rendering, the problem is likely in the codec or Adobe Media Encoder (if you render through AMC that is).
2A: IF your RAM preview is extremely slow, try hiding the layers one by one and making more RAM previews to locate problematic source files.
2B: If the RAM preview worked fine, try to render into a different, lossless format – like an uncompressed quicktime or avi file or a quicktime animation with max quality – directly from after effects (In the top menu: Composition/Add to render queue, where you'll likely find some lossless preset). Make sure you have A LOT of free hard drive space before rendering. If this rendering works fine you are left with a lossless file that can be compressed to the apple prores hq-format in any compatible software. For example, you can try opening the file in Premiere and render the Prores from there. With a google search you will probably find lots of ways to render Apple Prores files.
You could also check the resolution of both your main composition and your pre-comps. Avoid using unnecessarily high resolutions, it will only slow things down.
Restarting your computer to clear RAM memory and close eventual bugging processes could also be a good idea.
Good luck!
/Simon

Adobe after effects. AUDIO

Bueno pues soy nuevo por aqui y pues tengo unos problemas con el after pongo un video y pues no me se escucha el audio :( quien sabe por que le he buscado la forma y nada espero que me puedan ayudar. GRACIAS DE ANTEMANO.

primero que todo el preview de after effects lo tienes que efectuar desde la casilla time controls, ubicado al lado derecho de tu interfaz, o simplemente con la tecla 0 del teclado numerico, segundo, tienes que comprobar que la casilla de audio este habilitada, esta en time controls y el icono es una bocina, y tercero es que en el timeline de tu composicion si es un video con audio intergrado que aparezca al lado izquierdo de tu timeline junto con el icono del ojo que indica la visibilidad del layer, este tambien la bocina. si estas efectuando un preview o previsualizacion de tu material con la barra espaciadora, no te funciona el audio y no te reprocuce el video en tiempo real....

After Effects CS6 error: RAM Preview needs 2 or more frames to playback - any ideas please?

Hi everyone,
I'm running After Effects CS6 (11.0.4.2) on a MacBook Pro 2.8Ghz with 16GB RAM (Mac OS 10.9.4)
As a test, I created a 3 and a half minute Sequence in Adobe Premiere CS6, and then imported this into After Effects CS6, and placed it on the AE timeline.
This footage involves a couple of 1920x1080p footage movies, some psds and a large number of JPGs exported from two videos arranged as a sequence in two layers in Premiere, one on top of the other. So all in all for a Premiere / After Effects file I'd say it's reasonably heavy.
I then did a RAM Preview with Multiprocessing switched off - the 3 and a half minute sequence loaded into RAM, taking about 1min 30seconds, and played back in realtime at 25fps. This worked fine with 3,4,5 and 6 GB RAM available to other applications in the Memory Preferences. All things considered I think this is quite good. I can make changes, reclick the RAM Preview icon and my changes load into RAM and it previews ok.
My only 'complaint' is how long the RAM Preview takes to load up the whole thing.
I've been reading up on Multiprocessing and decided to try this to see if I can speed up the time it takes my RAM Preview to load up.
So I looked at some recommendations from Adobe and read information on various forums including this one.
My settings in the Memory Preferences are currently
• 6GB reserved for other applications
• Reduce cache size when system is low on memory - unticked
• After Effects Multiprocessing - ticked
• Installed CPUs (processor cores) - 8
• CPUs reserved for other applications - 6
• RAM allocation per background CPU - 3GB
• Actual CPUs that will be used - 2
This combination takes about 25 seconds to load up my 3 and a half minute sequence which I thought was pretty amazing.
I then pressed the stop button and then the play button - so now just playing the sequence briefly.
And also added a new layer - into the timeline - just a simple shape.
Then I tried a RAM Preview again.
I found I could load up part of the sequence but not load the whole thing into RAM.
I kept trying to get a RAM Preview and got this message
"After Effects error: RAM Preview needs 2 or more frames to playback" which seems to prevent RAM Preview from working.
Eventually I quit and restarted After Effects and the problem went away temporarily and then came back when I tried again.
I tried various changes to the Memory Preferences - trying 3GB available for other applications. This gave 13GB of my 16GB RAM to After Effects.
This made it take slightly longer for the After Effects error to appear but it still appeared.
I tried ticking Reduce Cache size in the Memory Prefs - the After Effects error still appeared, so having read this is supposed to make the issue better I now leave it untucked, but as far as I can see ticked or untucked, it makes no difference, the problem remains.
I've since tried -
Making 2,3,4,5 and 6 CPUs available for other applications.
Changing the Background RAM allocation per background CPU to 0.75GB, 1GB, 1.5GB, 2GB and 3GB
Lots of combinations.
But in the end, I always get the "After Effects error: RAM Preview needs 2 or more frames to playback" error.
It might take less or more time for the message to show up, depending on the combination of settings, but in the end I always got the same message appearing.
And I notice that I can RAM Preview less and less of the timeline. i.e. it becomes more blue than it does green and will load in only a small section of the timeline as opposed to the whole thing.
Reading further, I tried Edit > Purge > Image Cache and Edit > Purge > All Memory but still get the error message.
I also tried ensuring there were no other applications running e.g. Safari or Chrome or Firefox. And certainly not Photoshop or Premiere etc.
Reading even further, I tried two Memory management applications - 'Memory Clean' and 'Purge.'
Neither has had any effect - the After Effects error still appears.
Then I went back into the Memory and Multiprocessing Preferences.
I unticked Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously. And now the RAM Preview loads the whole 3 and half minute sequence in entirety, taking about 1 and half minutes to do so. It's working as perfectly as if I'd just quit and re-opened the application.
Then I went back into the Memory and Multiprocessing Preferences.
I reticked Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously.
The chose Edit > Purge > All
And tried a RAM Preview again. It loaded up in 25 seconds, but then, as previously, the error message came.
I tried Edit > Purge All - no effect.
And I tried going into the Media and Disk Cache Preferences and clicked Empty Disk Cache - still the problem remains.
I understand from my reading that After Effects CS6 11.0.2 was intended to fix this issue but I'm on 11.0.4 and as far as I can tell, I still have it - assuming it's the same thing.
As far as I can see, not using Multiprocessing allows me to work without these errors but take a bit longer to load the RAM Preview.
However I'd like to be able to use Multiprocessing as it seems it can potentially speeds things up quite a lot. I realise I could just not use it and AE would work, but I'd rather be able to make use of a feature of the software if possible, especially if it will speed things up and make optimum use of the my computer's hardware.
I've downloaded a trial copy of After Effects CC 2014. I'm still testing it but as far as I can see the RAM Preview error appears in this version of AE as well, but can take bit longer to show up in my experience.
Thanks everyone - if anyone has any thoughts or advice I'd appreciate hearing your opinions.
Kind regards,
John

You need to have much more RAM reserved for other applications and more CPUs reserved for other applications. Your current settings are crippling your performance.
Read these:
https://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2009/12/performance-tip-dont-starve-yo.html
http://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2010/03/performance-tip-dont-oversched.html
After you have adjusted your settings according to the recommendations on those pages, restart your computer and try again.

Slow preview playback in After Effects

Hi Folks
I just recently set up CS6 on a new z820 workstation and for some reason my after effects timeline does not playback in realtime when previewing. Everything is green on the timeline, yet when it plays it is about half speed. I have no doubt my system has the specs to play rendered media in real time (2x8core, Quadro 4000, 64GB Ram, Sonnet hard drive array) so obviously I have something set up wrong. I'm running a Kona 3 with the latest drivers and I suspect this is the culprit. I've had other issues related to the Kona, such as losing display to my external monitors sporadically. It will be fine for a while then suddenly the output signal turns either solid green or some form of garbled junk. Very strange, although the Kona output seems perfectly fine when I'm in Premiere.
Anyhow, any help zeroing in on the problem would be greatly appreaciated.
Best,
EE

Thanks Tom
However, I do think I have playback set to computer monitor (not in front of system right now). Definitely seems like there's something AE doesn't like about my card (it is an older version of the Kona 3). I have a support ticket in with AJA so hopefully that will turn up something.
As far as my Quadro 4000 goes, I was kind of forced into using it on account of other software on my system. If it was up to me, I would have put in a GTX680 or 690. I have a GTX680 at home and it is rock solid in AE and Premiere. Timelines that are heavily dependant on GPU accelerated FX render about twice as fast on my 6-core/GTX680 vs my z820/Quadro 4000 work system. I'm hoping to upgrade to the Quadro 5000K when it comes out, possibly with the Tesla sidekick. In the meantime, I have to sort out this Kona thing

Client Preview in After Effects

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for