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.

Similar Messages

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.

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.

Timecode display during RAM preview playback?

I can't seem to find any timecode that reports back the CT while doing a RAM preview. Am I correct in assuming this does not exist?
As a workaround I added a solid layer and added the timecode effect to it. Seems weird there is no playback timecode reported in any windows during a RAM preview so I must be missing something.
Thanks,
Cliff

To get a display of timecode in the comp window that's what you need to do. The time indicator in the timeline does not advance in a ram preview. The info palette only shows the fps if enabled.
The timecode effect applied to another layer or an expression from the expression library for timecode applied to an empty text layer will do the trick.

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

RAM PREVIEW VERY SLOW (FAR FROM REAL TIME) ON NEW MAC PRO

Good afternoon
I have the new mac pro with 8 cores, 64 Gb of Ram and dual AMD 700 graphic card, but the preview on After effects is slower than in the old mac pro (from 2010). I have set the preferences as told in your website and everything stills the same. Could you please advice? is very frustrating to see that a new machine works worse than the older one.
thanks

Attached below you can see some screenshots from the settings I have on AE CC

After effects ram preview video playback issue

Greetings -- I have Mac Pro 2.93 GHz 12 Core with Nvidia Quadro 4000 & 24GB Ram.
During ram preview playback, it seems as though the video isn't refreshing fast enough in the display -- meaning its almost as if I can see the refresh on the top/bottom half of the frame happening separately. It's a bit diffucut to describe, actually. This does not happen with the same clip in Premiere, just AE.
The rendered video is fine and plays in QT/VLC, etc. without issue, it's just ram preview and is very distracting.
Any help woul dbe greatly appreciated!
Seth

CS6, 720p clip, 100%, Full, 29.97 fps. This may be related to the preview settings... It seems to go away if I turn it to final quality v.s. adaptive.
Fast Draft:
Available
Texture Memory:
409.00 MB
Ray-tracing:
GPU
OpenGL
Vendor:
NVIDIA Corporation
Device:
NVIDIA Quadro 4000 OpenGL Engine
Version:
2.1 NVIDIA-7.10.2
Total Memory:
2.00 GB
Shader Model:
CUDA
Driver Version:
4.2
Devices:
1 (Quadro 4000)
Current Usable Memory:
1.11 GB (at application launch)
Maximum Usable Memory:
2.00 GB

RAM Preview Problems in After Effects CC

AE CS 6 RAM Previews work, but two problems to report with AE CC on the same computer. Possibly two faces of the same problem.
1. Having QuickTime Player open while doing a RAM preview makes the RAM preview stutter. I quit the player, and now the RAM preview plays back without dropping a frame, though Info palate shows "fps: 24 (realtime)", but the RAM preview playback is slow: ie, a tenor sounds like a baritone.
2. A RAM preview that looked and sounded fine last night, is now playing back slowly (tenor sounds like a baritone), though Info Palate shows "fps: 24 (realtime)". I have no other applications open. The only thing that changed is that I quit AE, slept the computer, slept a little myself, and then launched AE. Trashing the cache files (manually), rebooting, relaunching and re-RAM-previewing creates a functional RAM preview, so I assume there is some problem with the cached files or the retrieval of them.
Is anyone else getting either of these? If so, what is your system configuration?
Also, I posted on another thread that Quicktime import/render works with AE CS6 on this computer, but AE CC can not import, play, or render QT reliably (without throwing error messages). Perhaps all of this is part of the same problem.
Thoughts?
Cheers,
Benjamin
CS 6 CC | Mac OS 10.8.4 | MacPro5,1 | 96 GB Ram | PROJECT & MEDIA drive: Mercury Accelsior > 500 MB/s read/write | CACHE drive: Mercury Accelsior > 500 MB/s read/write | Nvidia Quadro 4000 Mac | CUDA Driver: latest update | Wacom Intuos 5

96 GB RAM is accessible in 10.8.4 on my machine according to OWC. I'm working on a stereoscopic 4K project with large files and hundreds of layers. I regurlarly render with AE MP while working with huge files in PS, and am glad to see the % of RAM AE uses displayed in my render cue between 3 and 60%.
I have 12 processors (24 with hyperthreading)
I have reserved 10 for other applications leaving 14 for After Effects
4 GB per x 14 = 56 GB for AE. leaving 40 GB for everything else
I've played with what and how much I have allocated being sure to keep the CPU counts even, but this does not fix the RAM preview problems described above. Any other suggestions?
Thanks,
Benjamin

AE CC 2014 Mercury Transmit Ram Preview with AJA flickers

Hey Everyone,
I have installed the latest AJA drivers and plugins and enabled Mercury Transmit preview in AE but when I render the preview the output flickers. One frame is normal the next is darker, normal, darker etc.
Has anyone got this working yet ?
Nic

Hi Nic,
I'm not familiar with that error message. It's probably generated by the AJA Preview plug-in. Can you post a screen shot?
8-bpc vs. 16-bpc does not always affect the appearance of the comp, it depends on the source material in use and how you are manipulating it. And in any case you can always switch between 8/16-bpc to get better performance when necessary. Keep in mind that switching color depths will invalidate any cached frames.
Some facts about RAM preview playback performance with video preview in After Effects:
Enabling video preview of any form uses the CPU and memory resources of your computer, and when these are in low supply can eventually result in slow frame rates during RAM preview playback. This is because as the frames are played they are transformed on-the-fly (no caching) to the format of the video preview device. The higher the memory requirements of the frame (resolution, frame rate, color depth), the sooner you'll see the playback frame rate slow down. After Effects does not have the option of dropping frames during playback to maintain playback speed, like how Premiere Pro does.
The AJA Preview plug-in does this frame transform more efficiently than After Effects, because AJA has optimized their hardware-based playback pipeline to perform these transformations. It can still eventually be impacted by performance issues. Also, the AJA Preview plug-in currently has some limitations with scaled comp resolutions and color management, so there may be times when you may want to use Mercury Transmit for video preview instead.
When you are having problems with real-time playback with RAM preview, regardless of whether or not video preview is enabled the answer is always the same: reduce the resolution, frame rate, and/or color depth of the comp. The Resolution and Frame Rate/Skip controls in the Preview panel are intended for you to do exactly that, and the Shift+RAM Preview Options allow you to define two different sets of controls so you don't have to fiddle with those options frequently. Also, enabling color management will slow down RAM preview, as it does an on-the-fly transformation to correct the colors for screen display, similar to video preview. You can either choose View > Use Display Color Management to disable just the display correction, which will likely result in wrong color appearance of your comp, or disable color management in the Project Settings dialog altogether. Re-enable color management when you want to check the colors.
Otherwise, the best solution for slow playback in After Effects when you have a memory-intensive comp is a more powerful CPU and more RAM.

QuickTime Player open while doing a RAM preview makes the RAM preview stutter

Update: Ooof. Having QuickTime Player open while doing a RAM preview makes the RAM preview stutter. I quit the player, and now the RAM preview plays back without dropping a frame, says it's 24 FPS, but the RAM preview playback is slow: iE, a tenor sounds like a baritone. Trashing cache, restarting, no luck.
system details in my profile.
ug. I just updated to 7/0/1 DL. Hope that didn't make things worse.

HI Tim. In a rendering, tweaking marathon for delivery. Awaiting progress bar now, and will unplug my monitor and thoroughly reinstal after delivery.
Regarding QT player, it is open with a reference movie that is not called upon by After Effects. I have not had a QT in my project since this problem arose a few weeks ago, just PNG sequences and .AIFs.
Multiprocessing is enabled with 4GB ram assigned to each thread, leaving 10 processers avilable for other applications.
I did just see 83% of my 96GB of ram "in use" while AE was divvying up tasks between processors on a failed PNG render. Quit, trashed cache files, and now it's rendering using 6% of RAM.
Happy to start a new thread... what would I call it?
Cheers,
B

Color Space Ram Preview

Yet another problem seems to have arisen with the new CC 2014.
When I try to do a RAM Preview even of a small section at lower rez the RAM Preview will not play back in real time and the audio is way off.
I get a note saying that "Color Work Space is on" which indeed it is. If I go into Project settings and switch Color Workspace to "None" my RAM Previews play perfectly.
In previous versions of AE including CC this was never an issue. Playbacks were fine even with a Colorspace and Linear workspace chosen.
Has anyone else had this problem? Is there a solution other than having to manually turn off my Color Workspace every time I want to do a quick RAM Preview?
Thanks
TAK

Takasaurus, can you be more specific about the RAM preview playback speeds you're getting with Display Color Management enabled?
For example, on my MacBook Pro, RAM previewing a 23.976 5K R3D comp at 32bpc in full resolution with color management enabled, in either After Effects CC 2014 (13.0) or After Effects CC (12.2.1), I get the following results:
Display Color Management enabled, Color Management Quality set to Faster or More Accurate Except for RAM Preview (same meaning in this context): ~11fps
Display Color Management enabled, Color Management Quality set to More Accurate: ~5fps
Display Color Management disabled: 23.976fps (real-time)
Under the hood, when Display Color Management is enabled After Effects does an additional color transform of every frame at the time it is displayed. These frames are not cached, the transform happens live at display time. (Note that you can enabled or disable Display Color Management without affecting the state of the comp's image cache; ie., the green bar in the Timeline panel.) This live transformation of the comp is what is impacting the ability to play back the frames in real time. Granted, a 5K R3D in 32bpc frame is almost a worst-case scenario in terms of memory and performance, but it shows the limits of the machine.
You can compensate for the memory usage with the same techniques that you usually would: reducing the RAM preview resolution or frame rate in the Preview panel, or reducing the color depth. Sounds like you're already doing that.
When using Mercury Transmit for video preview, something similar happens: After Effects does a live transformation of the video frame for the Mercury Transmit device, which can be even more complex due to scaling and/or frame rate limitations. Add color management to that and you get a double-whammy.

During ram preview ae cc wildly accessing system drive

After effects cc builds a ram preview of a 1920x1080 file without problem, the cache is on a secondary HD drive or SSD with plenty of speed and free space and there are 16 GB of RAM - but when the ram preview starts to play, sooner than 15 seconds it will become stilted and the system drive will start crackling like crazy. The activity of the system drive is so intense that the mac becomes sluggish and irresponsive.
An interesting aspect is that if it will keep playing as stilted as it is, after 2-3 cycles of the same ram preview range, the playback will become more fluid.
This happens - unbelievable- on a mac pro with 16 GB of RAM and latest Lion OS. All the files are on different drives than the system, and the cache was hard drives or ssd - all high speed, all internal drives.
And the latest surprise - assuming that maybe the system drive got too fragmented, I changed it for a brand new hd with all the programs transfered on the new drive from a time machine backup.
Same insane activity of the system drive at the less than 15 sec mark of ram preview playback.
Anyone encountered this wild accessing of the system drive by after effects cc during ram preview?

Good Points - you are partly right and my settings are attached here at the end.
I fiddled with them for a while (and even now they are too much in favor of AE) because it looked like they were not changing much from that weird behavior. The fact is that I tried most values - from max to minimum for background processes -nothing changed much except the speed of the rendering. The stumbling and the wild accessing of the main drive continued no matter what after the 14 seconds mark of all HD renderings.
Seeing than no one can help here either, yesterday I tried changing everything else in the Preferences to see what makes any difference in AE CC 12.1 and get over with this behavior.
And 2 unexpected settings really made a difference for me:
1-the QuickTime Video Preview, unchecked, ended the inescapable stumbling at the 14 s mark. I don't know how, but it made a crucial difference.
2- at the Memory page I checked the Reduce Cache size when system is low on memory. It prevented the RAM preview from using all the ram and leave the mac processes starving and turning the machine sluggish.
The Ram preview now happens in an interesting fashion (I have Memory Cleaner, a benign app, really useful to show how much RAm you really have at a given moment on a Mac). The green line above the timeline now expands until RAM decreases to low numbers like ~500MB RAM left. The Preview processing then waits a matter of seconds until the numbers increase again beyond 1.5 GB and then continues to extend the line - and so on until it reaches the end of the work area. There is no crackling anymore (accessing system HD).
I am using only SSDs and auxiliary HD drives (for output and source files) and all Ram previews now are completely quiet.
So, I have found my solution so far. But there still is a question the AE designers might want to think:
If they know that AE will unload the RAM onto the system HD, why don't they insert an option in the Prefs to allow this unloading to happen onto any secondary drive - choosen by the user.
A secondary drive unload at least will not interfere with the system processes - turning the mac sluggish and add insult to injury.
My numbers below could look tight now, but the previews are really fast and I quit all secondary processes on my mac when AE is working.

AE CS6: How to Ram preview or playback in smooth real-time everytime?

Hi guys,
I would like to know how to Ram preview or playback in smooth real-time everytime? I'm using a videohive template and adding in my footages to the media holder comps. The AE template is complex I guess.
Hee's the problem, everytime I make a change to text, add a footage replacement or make any change at all, I have to completely render and wait a long time to see my final product in "Real-time"/smooth. Is there someway that I can render out the whole thing once and even though I make a change the entire video will play smoothly without rendering time?
PC Specs:
HP 510t
Windows 8 Pro x64 bit
16GB Ram
i7 2600 CPU @3.4 GHz
GTX 660Ti

Proxies don't affect rendering beyond the point of reducing the resolution and thus the nuimer of pixels that need to be processed, but since the retain the effect properties at full resolution, e.g. a large blur still renders just as slow. They are more a means of reducing file I/O bandwidth while working really.... As I said, the best way to optimize this would probably be to restructure the project so parts that don't change reside in separate pre-compositions and can use the disk cache.
Mylenium

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

RAM Preview Playback Slow

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