I cannot RAM preview in AE CC.

I have After Effects CC on a Mac running OS X 10.9.2 with 14 GB of RAM. I cannot RAM preview. No matter what I set "Memory & Multiprocessing" to, RAM preview won't do anything.
Here's some details. Under "Memory & Multiprocessing," the final line, "Actual CPUs that will be used" stays at zero no matter how I allot the RAM and CPUs. This is really weird.
Then, when I hit RAM Preview, I get the dreaded "You must have 2 or more frames" error. I should have plenty of RAM, but AE cannot "find" it.
Obviously, I cannot work like this, so any help would be appreciated.
Additionally, when I open AE, I get these errors:
The GPU-accelerated ray-traced 3D renderer does not have enough free video memory (VRAM) to operate. The ray-traced 3D renderer will use the CPU. To allow the ray-traced 3D renderer to use the GPU, close other applications and restart After Effects
and
Quicktime is not installed on this system, some components will not work correctly.
I have Quicktime, and I have 512 MB of VRAM on an NVIDIA GeForce GT 120, so none of these should be true.
Help!
Owen

Delete your preferences file and accept the defaults.
If that does not start something then Update AE if you have not already. Then search this forum or AE help at the top right corner for "optimizing" and read the first two links.
Here's the link from AE: Adobe - Search: optimizing

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Cannot RAM Preview in CS6?

Hello! I have found myself in a bit of a predicament. I noticed yesterday randomly while working on a project that my ram preview function has stopped working. When I hit space bar(or control+0) for a preview, the time indicator starts counting up as normal, but the playhead stays stuck in one place, and my comp stays stuck on the frame where the playhead is. I have tried updating my after effects, opening new projects, and restarting my computer, but nothing has worked! I don't know what else I should try! Any suggestions?

I don't follow. Spacebar tries to play the timeline in realtime, Ctrl+0 toggles the visibility of the project window. Hitting 0 on the numpad with numlock on initiates a RAM preview.
Mylenium

Unable to RAM Preview in CS6?

Why I cannot RAM preview in CS6 with the same settings I've used in 5.5? In fact I can only RAM preview when I disable After Effects Multiprocessing.
Am I missing something here?

I'm having the same problem. It just stopped working mid-session. It was just after I'd been playing around with seeing how the image quality changed between Ray Traced and Classic, so I'm thinking maybe there is a bug there. If I start a new project, render a few frames of a test comp without MP, then switch MP back on, it works. However, if I load up the project where it originally stopped working, that doesn't work at all, no matter what I try. Might there be some sort of flag/setting in the project file that is to do with Ray Traced/Classic options that has become corrupted? I'm probably clutching at straws, but if there is a way to fix it, whether an official bug fix or tinkering around I'll give it a try to avoid re-building my project (or having to wait for long RAM previews...).
Mac OS X 10.7.4
3.39 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM
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There's got to be a better way to do this (RAM preview frustration)

I loaded a 1:20 second Full HD clip into after effects. I need to edit the video based on certain sounds in the video and see if I'm matching them up correctly by previewing it with sound.
The problem is i'm getting frustrated due to After effects not behaving like Premiere. First who thought it was a good idea not to incorporate sound into after effects? Second, I have an i7 sandy bridge processor, and 16 gbs of ram, yet it still takes time to render the ram preview (with no effects on it yet).
So ram preview is my only option for sound, but the problem is every time I hit ram preview it starts the video all the way from the beginning. This is frustrating as I want to start at a specific point. Imagine having a longer video where the editing needs to take place at the end.
There are people out there doing a lot more complicated professional projects, what do you guys do to get around this?
Why can't after effects do some basic things like premiere like render fast with sound? Is it due to Mercury engine and 64 bits?
This is one of the best products on the market, surely there is a better way to do this right?

but the problem is every time I hit ram preview it starts the video all the way from the beginning.
Window --> Preview, enable the "From current time" option
yet it still takes time to render the ram preview (with no effects on it yet).
There is no magic button. If it is compressed, naturally it needs to be decompressed and decoded first. This can consume resources even on fast machines. Furthermore, drive speed matters a lot in such cases. This might actualyl multiply, if you use multiprocessing, so for this kind of simple setup it's usually better to not use it. If your harddrives are fragmented or simply generally slow, frames cannot be loaded as fast and neither will AE be able to use the disk cache. Ergo, convert the footage and move it to the fastest drive in your system.
what do you guys do to get around this?
We preview at reduced compo resolution to extend RAM previews and place markers while the RAM preview plays using the * key on the numpad.
Mylenium

Unable to play Ram Preview, Iris Pro problem?

Hi, I cannot play the ram preview, when I click the button the image gets flipped and frozen. I can scrub the timeline and see the animation I am working on, but I need a real-time preview. I downloaded the last after effects patch for mavericks, but I think this is an issue with the Iris Pro graphics card. I really need help with this as I am in the middle of a project... thanks!

See this thread:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/5484272#5484272
The upshot is that your GPU is not compatible with After Effects CC (12.0). This problem will go away with the After Effects CC (12.1) update due out this week. See the part on this page about Intel GPUs:
http://adobe.ly/AE_CC_12dot1_details

RAM preview needs 2 or more frames, I've got a clue...

After struggling for half an hour or so, I think I'm on the right way to find a solution to this annoying problem. I'm using CS5 on Win7 x64 Ultimate. The problem is that AE cannot starts the ram preview: "after effects error: RAM preview needs 2 or more frames to playback". After having searched among several forums, I've tried all the tips suggested here and there: purged the cache, using a different codec for the clip I was trying to play back and so on., but no luck so far. I've also moved the Conformed Media Cache folders to another folder on my hard disk, thinking that the current ones were full or that maybe I could have some administration problem with those, neither this helped.
Then I've started from scratch and I've discovered that for some reason if I have all the H.264 clips in my project, even if I was using 1 clip only (and it was converted to an AVI clip non compressed used as PROXY) than AE couldn't ram preview my comp. Now I've reduced the project and I'm keeping that clip only in the project and it seems it's working now.
To add more oddness to the story, now it doesn't matter if I use the AVI proxy file or I do turn the proxy off switching to the H.264 file again. It seems it works either way.
Hope this can helps somebody else who's struggling with the same problem...

I have this problem with my supercomputer and After Effects CS5.... it used to work just fine.
I have an i7-980x, 16 gb RAM, Win 7 home premium, 2 ATI Radeon 5850 each with a gig of video RAM.
I have tried all of the online suggestions, entered a bug report, re-installed AE CS5 (Prod Premium Suite), then updated again.
All I get is the same error report. VERY Frustrating.
Disabled all firewall, antivirus.
Made a little comp of a white box changing position from frame 1 to 200,
Still won't RAM preview.
Please help!

MacPro does not react to Clear RAM Preview

In order to see the movie fluently I make a RAM Preview. That works fine. But I cannot erase the RAM-Preview. Only after restart of motion, the RAM is free again. When I check with "istat pro"-Widget, I can see that the RAM is full and clicking on "clear RAM preview" has no effect. Anybody knows what the reason for this behaviour could be?
Thanks for help or advice.
U

Have you done all the updates? Have you tried trashing your prefs?
Peter

RAM preview needs 2 or more frames error

Good Morning,
I have just encountered this error for the first time since i started using AE about 6 years ago.
I am running a PC (windows 7 pro), i5 2.90GHz 64-bit OS, 16GB RAM, and 1 GB Graphics card, dedicated 1TB HDD for Cache. Creative Cloud subscription.
I had no problems up until the update to 'After Effects CC 2014', since this update i cannot generate a RAM preview. I have read countless forums and i have followed previously suggested solutions (purge, remove VCReflect plugin, started AE as administrator etc), to no avail.
Any suggestions will be welcomed.
Will

The "RAM preview needs 2 or more frames to play back" message usually means 1 of 2 things. Either:
You have requested a RAM preview of only 1 frame.
There is not enough RAM available to generate more than 1 frame.
Regarding the first possibility, make sure that your comp is more than one frame long, and that your work area bar is set to more than one frame. Also make sure that in the Preview panel the From Current Time option is not enabled, if your current time indicator is on the last frame of your comp. In these cases the message is saying "You don't have more than one frame for me to play, so using RAM preview doesn't make sense: this single frame is already on screen and already cached!"
Regarding the second possibility, there are a number of contributing factors. Generally, make sure that there is available memory for After Effects to use, which you can check in Activity Monitor or Task Manager. If you don't have much free memory: use the Edit > Purge > All command, close other applications and/or restart After Effects or your computer. If you appear to have lots of free memory, start breaking down your comp, turning off effects and layers (including cameras and lights) until you can get a RAM preview without the error message.
Effects, in particular, can consume large amounts of memory, such as particle effects or effects that grow the layer bounds to very large sizes. If After Effects can't generate more than one frame for such a layer in the amount of available memory, you may get this error message.
If you're still having trouble, test by building simpler comps just to verify you can RAM preview anything, such as an animated shape layer or text or a piece of footage with no effects applied to it. If you need to post back to this thread, describe the contents of your comp, including the comp settings, layer types, effects applied, etc. Screenshots and screen capture videos are always helpful.

"RAM preview needs 2 or more frames to render playback" AE CC

This issue started out of nowhere for what I consider to be no reason. Working on average sized 720p compositions with modest animations.
I have tried all suggested solutions on this forum yet nothing has worked. I am running fresh comps in AE CC with absolutely no plugins, freshly purged memory, cleaned cache, restarted comp, no other applications running on computer and 13 gb of memory allocated to AE... etc.
I cannot seem to fix this issue.
Whats the next step?

Right! It's got a little bit worse... After the 'RAM preview needs 2 or more frames' window I purged then restarted and all was back on track for about 5 minutes, then it happened again and then the following series of warnings have locked AE in a cycle of warnings...
Below is the series of warnings I've just received followed by my memory and cache settings and then the memory left on my computer.
then
my memory settings
my cache settings
and the memory left on my computer
The file is 'just' a series of After Effects solids with masks (about 40), rigged together with Duik IK (not the puppet tool thing just the one that links layers together) and some wavs for the sound file.
Like I say I've probably done hours of lipsyncing over the last 15 years with far far heavier files (using HD footage and a far bigger comp with psd files) and I certainly haven't had this kind of persistent problem and it's only since I installed CC2014 last week...
grrrr and arrrrgh

Error in After Effects RAM Preview after updating to Yosemite

There is an issue of RAM preview not showing video for the first several frames (a second or so) on the first run in After Effects.
No problem under Maverick.
Which means it has to do with the yosemite System-update.
This bug should really be fixed with some priority!
Apparently, Adobe cannot fix it (or don't want to).
So it's Apple who has to do something!!!

Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.
Feedback

No realtime playback during RAM preview

Ever since I upgraded to the newest MacPro, AE has been unable to play a RAM Preview in realtime. Even during the most simple of compesitions, RAM preview fluctuates between 20fps and 59.94fps and will never "lock in" to realtime. Resolution is set to full and zoom is set to 100%. We have compared all the settings to other, less powerful, machines in our studio and still cannot make it play realtime.
Mac Pro 2 x 2.66 Ghz - 6 Core intel Zeon
24 gb Ram
30 inch Apple Cinema Display
ATI Radeon HD 5870
OSX 10.6.6
Kona LHe 9.1
AE 10.5.0.253

I'm guessing the problem is with your Kona card. AJA has been having issues with CS5.5 and they just released updated drivers and have split the Adobe app plugins into their own installer now on the Windows side.
Unfortunately, you say you're already using the Kona 9.1 drivers so you're in the same boat as me with the poor playback in RAM previews.
Removing the Kona card instantly put my RAM previews back to normal, but it's not a proper solution.
Here are some tips I received from AJA support on this issue a few days ago:
OPTIMUM AE Settings for best performance:
Make sure the AJA video preview setting matches the sequence.
Use a RGBA video preview setting and not RGB 10-bit.
In AE preferences -> video preview set Output Quality to Faster.
Go to Project Settings -> set color settings -> depth and set to 8-bits per channel.
Make sure you are viewing at 100% during playback.
I just put the Kona 3G card in last week and CS5.5 instantly had playback issues in both AE and Premiere. I got the 9.1 drivers AJA released this week and everything was fine after that! Halfway through a project yesterday, my RAM previews started lagging again. I'm working with AJA to resolve and if I get it figured out, I will post the solution here.

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

No audio in Ram Preview

Hi. I'll try and be a short and detailed as I can. After Effects CS5.5. Import an audio track or video containing audio and I cannot hear audio during playback after Ram Preview is created. I can hold the control key and scrub audio. Audio renders when I render the project. I can do an Audio Preview only, but I cannot seem to figure out how to see the graphics (which are animated to the audio itself) and hear the audio play back at the same time. This creates a unique problem when creating graphics which are timed to the audio. Do I really need to render the entire project every time I want to preview my work?
Thanks...

Well let me try to give you the big picture (pun intended)
What you can't see here: I use a Bose 2.1 speaker system (not that that has any impact).
Audio renders fine, scrubs fine, I can do an audio preview fine but NEVER both an audio and video preview.

Unable to create image buffer after RAM preview

Running into an odd and frustrating error. Built a comp using the new Ray-traced 3D renderer and now I'm regretting being an early adopter big time with all the problems I've been encountering with it. The latest comes whenever I do a longer RAM preview in an attempt to watch the whole duration of my comp. It will get to about 170 frames or so, at which point I've interrupted by pressing spacebar because I don't need to see all the way to the end of my work area (around 220 frames). It'll play the RAM preview back fine, and even loop it, but as soon as I stop playback, I get this error message: "After Effects warning: Unable to create image buffer." There's only one button: "okay" and as soon as I click it the same error pops up again and it will never go away, forcing me to close AE from the task manager. I've taken to saving before every RAM preview like I used to do with Flash before previewing my buggy swfs for fear I'll lose all my work after previewing. Any ideas about what might be causing this?
Some more details about my comp:
1920x1080 @ 29.97
Ray-traced 3D
About 70 3D layers (I'm guessing this is my downfall - new renderer not designed for this many layers?)
Running Windows 7 Professional
i7 2600K
32GB RAM
2x GTX 570 video cards running latest driver (301.42, CUDA 4.2.1)
508GB free on my 2TB internal drive where the project and cache lives
From my GPU info window in case it's useful:
Fast Draft:
Available
Texture Memory:
600.00 MB
Ray-tracing:
GPU
OpenGL
Vendor:
NVIDIA Corporation
Device:
GeForce GTX 570/PCIe/SSE2
Version:
3.0.0
Total Memory:
1.20 GB
Shader Model:
4.0 or later
CUDA
Driver Version:
4.2
Devices:
2 (GeForce GTX 570, GeForce GTX 570)
Current Usable Memory:
1.04 GB (at application launch)
Maximum Usable Memory:
1.25 GB

Yeah, some buffer is very likely not flushing when you interrupt the preview and then there is no more memory on the graphics hardware. Consider setting the work area and your preview options to use only the work area. if it finishes the preview "correctly", it may not suffer the issue. Beyond that - raytracing doesn't/ shouldn't care about the number of items. The math is such, that it makes no difference whether you render a million polygons or just one. Of course there are still limitations due to the GPU dependency, but I doubt you ever truly exhaust the cards' geometry buffers. Compared to pixel data that is a small amount...
Mylenium

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.
>

I cannot RAM preview in AE CC.

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