CS4 RAM preview slow

Ever since I installed CS4 nothing will RAM preview over 8 frames a second.
I am running on a Mac Pro 2x2.8 quad core Intel, 8gig Ram, files are on a Raid 5 XSAN storage with 31 terabytes of space...
I've tried everything I can think of. I even imported in SD footage and tried playing back at 1/20th of the resolution. Tried unchecking color management, open gl previews, proxy renders into motion jpegs...nothing is working.
Any suggestions?

Hmmm..interesting.. thanks for the responses.
Cameron - CS4 is laid out a little different in the "memory/multiprocessing" tab but yeah I've tweaked every possible setting in this with no luck.
Mylenium - Doesn't feel right but XSAN may be the issue. Even when I run the project file and source files on the local machine I still get the same RAM playback problem. I run a MAC lab with 18 other stations like mine and I don't seem to have a problem from any of the other computers. The only real difference is that I have XSAN administrator installed on my machine while the others only have the client and I did not uninstall CS3 (for troubleshooting purposes). Perhaps the CS3 copy is interfering? I don't really want to toss this as every once in awhile I'll find that I need the older version laying around.
I'll do some more troubleshooting ...thanks.

Similar Messages

After Effects CS4 ram preview slow start-up (8 core)

Hi,
I have an Intel 8core PC and I'm working with After Effects CS4 on Windows Vista 64 bit.
When I press on ram preview the CPU usage has a slow startup till 100%.. Is this common or? Cause it takes a while till it really uses the CPU of 100%.. so it has a delay..
Thanks!

I have a similar system. 2 AMD Opeteron 2.3gb quad processors, 8 gb of RAM, Quadro FX5600 video card. I had called Adobe support about how slow my new system was compared to the old system that had a dual core Intel with CS3 and Win XP Pro. Here is the problem:
On the new 64 bit architecture, After Effects CS4 is still a 32 bit program but takes advantage of renders with the 64 bit OS by running After Effects on each core. If you only have 8gb of Ram with 8 cores( like I do), After Effects is loading on to each core. This leaves 1 GB per core to run the OS and After Effects. He told me what I need to do is (1) eliminate half the cores or (2) load the system up with 32 Gb of Ram. I'm currently order more Ram memory but have disabled all but 2 cores in msconfig advanced tab. It working much better at this point. Still slow but not dragging. I've order another 16 Gb of ram and will replace the other old 8 gb of ram with another 16gb at a later date.

AE CS4 - why such poor RAM preview on my FAST machine?

Hi all, I just installed After Effects CS4 - I have a smokin fast mchine: quadcore Zeon 3.20 GHz, hyperthreading turned on, nvidia quadrofx 3800 with current driver, 12 GB DDR3 RAM, windows 7 64bit ... can you PLEASE help me troubleshoot a problem: even on the simplest compositions, a moving picture or a moving piece of type, the RAM preview stutters along, the current time indicator hops along at a choppy pace, images in the frame dont look like they're moving smoothly, and all i get is about 6 seconds of RAM preview ... seems to me that I used to get better performance on a MUCH MUCH slower machine under windows XP ... i have looked around the forums and seem the advice on multiprocessor options and the like, but nothing I do seems to help ... do any of you have any advice for me to improve my performance??? if you have any questions about my setup or preferences, let me know, I will be on this until I get what I expect out of my (otherwise incredibly fast) machine

Hi Todd, thanks again for your reply ... FYI, I bought the FX3800 for Avid editing, for which it is the qualified video card, and supports distributed processing in the Avid along with my DX HD hardware BOB - I had hoped it would work well with After Effects, too, but I do understand the Adobe is very transparent about the fact that, as long as your card has OpenGL support, probably best to sink your $$$ into more RAM or faster CPU .. but to stay on topic, I am just very stunned that I am not getting better playback with my system ... I have the most recent Nvidia drivers ... I have 2 NEC 2490WUXi2 each connected through DVI-D to my video card, each runnign at its native 1920x1200 res, 59 hertz ... the programs I have installed are Adobe CS4 Production Premium, Win7 64bit, MS Office 2007 Enterprise, latest version of Quick Time, Media Player version 11, and NERO 9 ... you dont think that one of these video player apps (like media player or QT) are messing with my screen performance do you? what about Nero 9, have you heard any compatibility or display problems associated with this app? would unistalling any of these programs be a troubleshooting technique that you'd attempt?
Finally, when you say "an issue with a bottleneck of drawing to the screen" what do you mean exactly? 'cause this kinds sounds like a goood description of what I am seeing ... what might be the cause of such a bottleneck, I am willing to try anything ...
Thanks, sir, for your reply!
Derek Reid
Trader Multimedia Inc.
www.tradermm.com
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:46:43 -0600
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: AE CS4 - why such poor RAM preview on my FAST machine?
Just one thing to cut down a frequent misconception:
Your nice graphics card doesn't do much for After Effects performance.In fact, trying to use OpenGL for rendering (including rendering of previews) can cause problems.
I recommend turning OpenGL rendering off for all but interactions. I.e., choose the http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WSAF696587-2D81-42e2-B248-4C5C2B7D3614a.html and turn off http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103a4f2dff7-79e8a.htm l. OpenGL is not compatible with Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing.
I'm not saying that OpenGL is your problem. Rather, because you mentioned your nice graphics card, I just had to stress that you need to forget about that with regard to After Effects. It's not really relevant.
It may be that the jerkiness is an issue with a bottleneck of drawing to the screen. (I don't know, but it's possible.)
Your hard disk being too slow wouldn't be an issue with RAM previews, since the frames are all cached in RAM.
>

Multiprocessing works for RAM preview, extremely slow and aeselflink crashes when in Render Queue

Hello all,
System specs:
Hackintosh
OSX 10.9
3.5Ghz (overclocked to 4.2Ghz) Core i7
Geforce GTX 580 classified 3GB Cuda GPU
AMD Radeon HD 6870 1GB Display GPU
32 GB of RAM
System SSD
5 drive internal RAID
After Effects CC 12.2.1.5
Cuda drivers up to date
I'm having a problem with the render queue and multiprocessing. I have a moderate sequence with several effects and 3D layers. When I'm working in the composition, everything goes great. I can RAM preview and all my CPU cores will kick up to 100% and render the composition in no time all; with full resolution with no skipped frames. It works fantastically.
Then when I go to render the exact same composition with the same multiprocessing settings, AE will hang at the "initializing background processes" for at least 5-10 minutes, during which the CPU will ramp up to 100% but no frames will be rendered. AE still remains responsive, as I can hit the stop or pause buttons and the queue will be cancled. But then the aeselflink processes (up to 8 of them depending on my settings, I've tried several) will still continue at 100% cpu load even with AE not set to render anything. I will have to go into the activity monitor and force quit each process. If I leave it for 5-10 minutes, it will finally stop initalizing and start the render, but the CPU will still run at 100% but the frames will crawl slowly forward at about 1 frame per minute, with an estimated 28 hours to render frames that were rendering in under a minute during RAM preview.
I have tried both reducing the number of cores AE will use, adjusting the allocated RAM, and disabling multiprocessing alltogether. When I disable multiprocessing, the render slows to a complete crawl, and it will render around 1 frame every 5-10 seconds. Again, this is on a composition that rendered in less than a minute on full resolution with RAM preview.
The only way to get this composition to render is to export it to Media Encoder, which will render it (without multicore processing, unfortunately) in about 8 minutes, still not the blazing fast RAM preview but at least it finishes it in under 3.5 hours (the amount of time that the multiprocessing disabled render in AE will take).
Here's the multiprocessing settings that have been very stable and carried me through other projects. Disk Cache is not enabled. The only other thing that is disabled is the "Disable Layer Cache" under the Secret menu as the plugins I'm using (Plexus 2 in this case) doesn't like to update when the camera moves so this option has been disabled to force it to reset each frame.
Does anyone know what is going on?
Also, please don't tell me that I should not use multiprocessing or instruct me on basic steps as to increase preformance on my machine. I have been tweaking my memory and multiprocessing settings for a long time now, and it is completely stable in everything but this setup. So please no answers saying "just don't use multiprocessing". It was made for a reason, it's effective, and it's needed. And please don't say that it's the hackintosh, either, as it's the most stable and powerful computer I've ever used. Sorry for the disclaimers, I just want to have constructive help.
Thank you in advance for your ideas!

Hi Rick, not sure if you saw the part where I said please don't reply with turning off Multiprocessing, and I did not say that it works and is effective in all areas. However, if you actally take the time to read my post, you will definately notice that RAM preview with multiprocessing takes under a minute to render a scene. Multiprocessing disabled and rendered in AE takes 3.5 hours. In Media Encoder it takes around 8 minutes. Clearly it IS working and IS effective for my case and my rig. Any vendettas against MP does not help my situation at all.

CS5 RAM preview is slow if I do other things while it's building

Good morning!
I'm experiencing a strange issue. 1080/29.97 comp on an 8-core w/ 16GB. Multi-proc rendering is off.
If I RAM preview the comp (800 frames or so) and wait while AE builds the RAM preview, it plays back fine & at speed.
If I start the RAM preview, then go work in Photoshop while it's building, then return to AE and attempt to play it down, I have the green bar like a normal RAM preview, but it plays very slowly -- almost as if it's re-rendering every frame (actually slower than if I just hit spacebar to render&play on the fly).. maybe 1fps. If I stop and play those frames that it's slogged through, they then play normally.
Is it possible that RAM previewing while I'm using another app (e.g., Photoshop) is resulting in the frames being written to swap disk or elsewhere so that they're being re-read into RAM when I actually try to play it? Disk caching is disabled in the AE Prefs, but...?
Thanks in advance for any ideas -- very annoying.

> Is it possible that RAM previewing while I'm using another app (e.g.,
Photoshop) is resulting in the frames being written to swap disk or
elsewhere so that they're being re-read into RAM when I actually try to
play it?
Yes. That is possible.
Be sure that you're reserving enough RAM for other applications.

AE CC ram previews very slow - no GPU support? Newbie trying to become not newbie, falling at first hurdle...

Hello. I'm currently trialling After Effects CC though Adobe Cloud. But I've hit a snag immediately.
I have an HD video edit in Premiere Pro which I want to dynamically import into AE to work on some bits.... I have imported the project file into AE, it seems to open just fine but the playback is intensely slow!
I have an uncertified GPU - a Nvidia Geforce gtx 460 - too old? I was expecting it to help out a bit, I'm not doing anything too badass, just colour correcting a bit of HD footage.
My processor is an i5 3.4ghz 4 core.
Perhaps I'm missing something fundamental here!? Please tell me what I'm completely failing to grasp
Thank you for your time,
Tony

Yup -- you're misssing a very basic item: AE doesn't work like Premiere Pro. It's not anything like PP, and it doesn't behave like it.
One way is the method you need to play video. Space bars just don't work. You need to do a RAM Preview -- hit the zero key on the numeric keypad, let AE render the frames it can, and then it plays them back as fast as it can.

Slow RAM Preview in CC, any suggestions?

I am running my CC on a Windows 8.1 OS, with 24 GB RAM, an EVGA GeForce GTX 760 4GB graphics card, and i7 3570k Quad Core 3.4GHz processor. However, I am still experiencing an issue with struggling RAM preview. I've also altered the cuda supported cards in the Premiere file, so as to allow my GTX 760 access to the softwares, and still a slow rate of rendering speed. Therefore, I'm wondering if you would happen to know what the issue could possibly be, or if I should purchase new hardware or something. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Help>About will show you the version number.
Do you accidentally have the ray-traced renderer turned on for your composition instead of the standard renderer?
Do you have Depth of Field turned on for your camera?
Tutorials often speed up RAM previews to prevent boredom on the part of the viewer.
The size of the emitter is unrelated to the processing power it takes. What matters is how many particles are being created
SomeGenericName wrote:
I watch the Task Manager every time I'm doing something intensive on AE and my CPU always sky rockets to to using 99% of its power. Now is AE a software that uses mainly GPU support, or should it actually be using that much CPU power?
After Effects uses the GPU for very little. See here: GPU (CUDA, OpenGL) features in After Effects
Side note: The ray-traced renderer is now considered obsolete, so if you had not heard about it before, don't get all excited and start learning it. Learn this instead.
CPU and RAM are the two most crucial things for AE. This page might help: Optimizing for performance: Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects

AE CS4, Kona 3 and Half Res RAM Preview.

Hi,
I am having a very annoying problem trying to RAM preview in AE CS4 at half res/50% and below.
My system configuration is
MacPro 2008, 16GB RAM, 8800GT.
I am running AE 9.02 on 10.5.7 and am not using the AJA CS4 utilities as they create some problems on my workstation, AJA Kona3 driver v7.1
I am outputting and HD SDI signal to HD SDI monitor, with the AE preference video preview selected on AJAKona 1080i25 RGBA. (Full HD comp of course) While at Full/100% everything is working in Realtime and I have my full HD preview running on my monitor, as soon as I choose to preview in Half Res and 50% size, everything runs at 6-8 fps. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO WORK LIKE THIS! and is very frustrating.
In a comp which is standard PAL all works fine in Full/Half/Quarter etc...
My AJA control panel output1 is set to 1080i and the secondary output to 625i and is connected to an SD monitor in order to have both HD and SD monitoring but this should not be a problem....
I am desperately looking for a solution for that and any help will be appreciated.
ThanX in advance and happy holiday season to all.
jm.

Cool, I tried that as well and it worked.
Then I remembered that I had had to stretch things out originally because when I imported them they played at double speed. So I bumped my preview playback from 29.97fps to 15fps and un-stretched them. Then I created the preview and the preview played right, and also the RAM save copy played right. So that was it. I just had to change my preview speed and render speed to 15fps, which is apparently the speed of the video from my input device.
Thanks a million!

Audio Slow/Off-Tempo during RAM Preview & Rendered Video

Hi,
I am trying to do something very simple; cut a 5 second clip from a tv episode.
I opened After Effects, imported the episode, dragged that into the composition window to create a composition, clipped the beginning and ending points. Nothing fancy.
Whenever I do a RAM preview, the audio is super slow and way off. I can't even tell what they're saying.
I had read other places that if you ignored that and just rendered the video, it would turn out okay. That didn't happen. It's still messed up.
The episode video (avi) I started with has normal audio and I've double checked the frame rate options and audio options...
Can someone please help me with this, because I can't find an answer anywhere.
Thanks,

Extract/ convert the audio externally. If it doesn't even render correctly, it means it is compressed and AE can't properly deal with it.
Mylenium

RAM Preview Playback Slow

I upgraded to AE CS4 and now the playback frame rate of my RAM previews will never play in realtime.
Even in the simplest comp (DV NTSC 29.97fps) my RAM previews playback at about 20fps.
On this same system in AE CS3 I could do HD Comps that were fairly complicated and get HD 24fps previews in realtime.
Any ideas on where to start looking for the problem? I've searched the forum for a similar issue, but the posts I have found don't relate to my issue.

I'm on a Dual Core 2.66 machine with 2mbs of RAM.
I turned off the external preview option, and now I get realtime RAM previews. I had it going out of a Kone LHe card. That was never a problem in CS3, and I have the latest drivers for the Kona.
I'd like to be able to preview out to my external HD monitor. Any ideas on what I could tweak to do so? I've looked at the improve performance page. My issue is less about render times (I'm happy to wait), but I do want RT previews.
Thanks for the input so far.

Audio Tempo is Wrong and Slow in RAM Preview

I am trying to get After Effects and audio to play nice, but I am having problems. I exported 2 minutes of audio from GarageBand (no compression) and brought it into AF. I have a new composition (set at 29.97) and my Preview panel is also set to 29.97.
The problem is that my RAM preview sounds wrong. Not only does it seem a hair slow, it also sounds like the tone is lower throughout the piece (one may cause the other). When I render a movie, the audio sounds fine. Any thoughts?
I have an iMac i7 with 8GB RAM and I have set my buffer size to 4096 in the AF preferences pane for Audio Hardware (is there any reason not to crank this all the way up?). I am running Mac OS 10.6.3.

Mylenium wrote:
check the audio hardware settings in your prefs and in your system's Quicktime settings panel. Sounds like you are having audio buffer delay set too long/ buffer size set to high, resulting in the playback getting out of sync.
Mylenium
There are no such controls for the MacOS and sound cards are rare in the Macintosh, usually only associated with big audio apps like MOTU (but I've never used any of those products). The non-expandable iMac does not have a sound card at all. You gets what you pays for in the iMac.
If an audio track cannot play well or properly in AE, it is my experience that it's easier to use a lower rez version of the track than to fight what is going to be a losing battle with AE's audio preview paradigm. Doesn't always work, though, which is why I can only rely the audio waveform display for placing accurate audio hooks.
bogiesan

Why do RAM previews get slower towards end of comp?

I was just wondering, why do RAM previews and even updates in the comp. monitor when playing with effects get slower as you get deeper into the comp.? When i first begin a comp everything is extremely fast but when 2 to 3 minutes of the comp is completed everything slows down and each frame takes like 4 or 5 seconds to load. Do you think it's a matter of RAM?

No. Whatever issues you have are specific to your setup like calculations on effects accumulating or multiplying. This can easily happen with particle effects or temporal effects like Timewarp - the later the time in the comp, the more particles or frames have to be processed. You have not provided any relevant info, anyway, so there is not much point to making generic claims based on such vague and incomplete info. We know nothing about your system or even what version of AE you use, so aprdon me, this is pointless.
Mylenium

After effects slow ram preview hold for 4 seconds before starting

Hi I have upgraded from After effects CS5.5 to CC 2014 , and I notices that when I want to make Ram view by hitting 0 num pad key , it pauses for 3 or 4 seconds before it start caching , and it become really annoying if you want to ram preview every 1 min , I tried playing around with the Preferences /Memory/ Ram reserved for other apps , but no good .
That was not the case in CS 5.5 , is it was starting caching as soon as I hit the 0 key .
I am working on Mac pro workstation , quad core intel xieon 2x 3.2 Ghz Mac Os 10.7.5
Thanks

I am guessing that you have MP rendering turned on in the preferences. Please turn it off and test again.

After Effects CS4 freezing with RAM preview audio?

Firstly, I'm on a mac. This problem just started a few hours ago after I made some system updates. When I hit preview in a comp with audio it runs through the frames, then locks up when it would normally start playing. I just get that dang spinning beach ball of doom. If I turn off the audio on the layer, it previews fine. I believe the only think I had updated when this problem began was upgrading to quicktime 7.6.2. Would this effect the RAM preview? Since the problem, I've updated AE to 9.0.2 and OS 10.5.7 with no change.
Anyone come across something similar?
Thanks

Mmh, well, seems ominous, but quite obviously QT is somehow involved. do you use any dedicated video hardware such as AJA or BMD cards? If so, the QT update may have introduced an incompatibilty with their drivers... Even if not using any such equipemnt, definitely check your QT system control panel. Also use OnyX to flush your QT components cache. They may just need to re-initilaized to function properly. Short of that I'm not aware of such issues, but anything is possible. If the issue persists, using Pacifist and downgrading your QT may be the only option. What Mac are you on exactly?
Mylenium

Super slow audio RAM preview issues in AE CS5

Hi all,
I've been having a tough time previewing audio while working in AfterEffects. I'm using Version 10.0.2.4, running on a 2x2.66 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon Mac Pro with 64 gigs of memory.
I've opened up projects that have never given me any issues in the past and I seem to be experiencing the same issue, over and over again:
When I try to preview a comp with audio (either hitting "0" on the keypad, or "." on the keypad), I get the "spinning beach ball" for at least 20-30 seconds before the audio kicks in. When I disable audio in my preview window, I have no delay with the RAM preview.
This happens with .aiffs and .wav files.
I've done the usual tricks -- restarting my machine, double checking to make sure there's not an issue with my speaker setup, repairing permissions, checking for updates.
Has anyone else experienced these issues, and is there a workaround? I have a job coming up that requires me to quickly preview audio and waiting 30 seconds every time I need to check my progress with a RAM preview is going to be soul-crushing.
I'll happily answer any questions -- I'm sure there's a bunch of info I've left out, and fingers crossed it's just some setting that I've ignored that's causing this issue.
Thanks,
Dan

Sorry for all the questions, but...
What path/hardware does your audio take to be output? Analog from the Mac? Via a third party card like an AJA or Blackmagic device? USB speakers?
Have you specified the audio device in the AE audio hardware preferences? Have you tried outputting to a different device, or removing the device and just using the standard system audio?

CS4 RAM preview slow

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for