Random Flashing Color Bars within Quicktime Files during RAM Preview Only

Question

I have been getting random color bar flashes within quicktime files in AE CC during RAM previews using Multi Processor rendering. Files other than .mov seem to not have this issue (although I have seen it twice...though it may be due to quicktimes in the comp). The rendered output using MP rendering is completely fine. If I turn off MP rendering the ram preview is fine. The source material is coming off a RAID 5 at 600-800MBs, I have moved the footage to a local SSD and a standard spindle drive with the same results. I have tried everything.....disabling GPUS in preview, disabling Fast Adaptive Preview, Disabling Disk Cache, Adjusting MP settings and RAM usage per core, disabling hardware accelleration of interface, adjusting gpu memory useage, every codec under the quicktime wrapper including uncompressed codecs, updating Blackmagic drivers, updating quicktime, limiting how many processors Windows 7 64bit can see, resetting AE preferences. I even installed After Effects clean on my second boot drive for gaming with no plugins or other apps, same issues. Have discussed this heavily with tech support at Adobe and they are working on it for a few days before getting back to me. When I got off the phone the tech was of the mind that I have too many cores for the Quicktime codec to handle.
My system :
Windows 7 64bit
Dual Xeon E5-2687W: 16 Physical cores and 32 cores with Hyperthreading
32GB 1866 DDR3
3xNvidia GTX 680 4GB cards
SSD boot and seperate SSD media cache drives
8TB internal SAS RAID 5 using a ATTO card
Blackmagic Deckline Extreme 3D+ card
Any help or thoughts would be greatly appreciated as this is a huge boon to my workflow. Having purchased a $12K system for grading and rendering....not being able to use the ram preview in AE with multiple cores is a huge inconvenience.

Answer 1

Here is the requested taskmanager screenshot. As my test comp only has a single duplicated quicktime in it, it renders too fast to really catch the AE instances doing anything. So this is from a heavier comp. Settings are as pictured above with 3GB per core using 8 total cores of the 32. It did flash the bars.
Here is what I tried tonight:
- Followed the link on Quicktime having trouble with too many processors. Using MSCONFIG I dropped the recognized Processors to 21, 16, and 8 and tested all three settings. Each had the flashing bars issue. Again as usual, at random, sometimes 3 previews before showing up, sometimes the first preview run. I have noticed that the ram previews that take a little longer seem to be clean. Then sometimes it seems to fly through the preview, grabbing large chunks on the green progres bar above the timeline, or many little chunks very quickly....these are usually the preview runs that will show the flashing bars. I make a point of purging the cach between each one so it doesn't remember, plus I have disk media cache off, but sometimes I get the feeling it's remembering bits.
- I removed all the Quicktime Components from the QTComponents folder and tested it. Flashed the very first run without any quicktime components.
- Followed the Firewall or TCP instructions and made sure everything was allowed through ZoneAlarm. However I could not find the QT32 Server listed anywhere or figure out how to add it. No matter because I closed and force quit all of the firewall processes as well to make sure. Still flashed.
- I followed all the advice on the landing page for Quicktime-related problems
- I also tested out ram previews again thourougly with the same clip but converted to a Tiff sequence. No matter what I tried there was never any flashing in the ram preview with tiffs.
- I also re-tested the clean render output. Made a ram preview with the flashing bars, then without purging rendered it out to a quicktime file and there were no bars at all in the rendered output. I even tried duplicating this render output 6 times in the render queue and rendered them all at once. Not a single one had a flashing bar frame. I even played all 6 1080P uncompressed 4.2.2 YUV 10bit pieces off the RAID with no dropped frames or hichups.
- Killed every process in the taskmanager but for essential windows processes and the flashing bars were still present
- Set the priority to Real-time for every AE process including Adobe QT32 Server, Dynamiclinkmanager, and all the AE processes. Still flashed.
I am now considering disabling two of my GPUs in the device manager. However I'm a bit worried about disabling the wrong one and being locked out. Any thoughts? Is the computer to powerful for some process somewhere? Why only in RAM preview? Thanks again.