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?

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Hi,
I'm wondering if anyone has seen this or can provide some direction for further investigation. This is on a new Mac Pro on which I have just installed FCS
In some projects the RAM preview has no effect on playback performance. After generating a RAM preview, the project will play at the same speed (say 2 fps) and as soon as I pause playing, the green progress bar that indicates project is loaded in RAM disappears or becomes fragmented - without modifying the project in any way. When this happens it also becomes nearly impossible to do additional editing as every simple task (as simple as resetting the play range) can result in the spinning beachball. There was a recent thread on RAM preview issues (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12215113&#12215113) but it appears the problem there was due to a long HDV project. The projects I experience this on generally have a lot of particles or replicated elements, but are standard 720 x 486 resolution projects lasting less than 10 sec. System memory usage is relatively small, less than 4 GB.
These issues arise on a recently purchased MacPro (3.33 GHz 6-Core, 16 GB RAM, ATI 5870). The boot disc is an OWC SSD, and user folders, scratch, etc are on separate hard drives. I installed the operating system on the SSD using the installation disc, and have manually installed all my programs from their original discs. (I initially used migration assistant to bring over applications, but that failed with some applications, so I wiped clean and started over). There have also been some past threads on how different hardware configurations can affect performance, but I don't seem to be doing anything abnormal here.
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Tested ram using memtestosx
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Before each test or comparison I reset preferences.
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The upgrade to a MacPro was mainly for other CPU and RAM intensive applications unrelated to video or graphics, but I expected motion to show a nice performance boost over the MBP on this new machine. Anyhow, any insight or direction for further investigation that I should pursue will be appreciated.
Thanks.

I tried your project (nice, BTW), and yes, 20,000+ particles take some time to render. However, when I did a RAM Preview, I had no problems - after render it played at full speed.
UNTIL...
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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
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I have been researching this issue all day. I have seen a variety of posts but no solution for me yet.
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My composition is quite simple at the moment, I just need this snippet of audio to create a simple animation...
I'm able to listen to the audio with ram preview in the Viewer, but once I add it to the composition, I get the error.
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Audio settings are:
My computer info:
Any help is appreciated. Thanks

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I have 4 GB of RAM.
I have enabled the 3GB switch.
Win XP Pro.
Dell Precision T7400 - Dual Quad core.
Lots of HD space.
Nvidia Quadro FX 570.
Sound Card: Creative Soundblaster X-Fi

See "FAQ: Why does RAM preview only play part of my composition?".

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on my desktop I have my psd file, and I often throughout the day will hit space bar to do a quick preview of the image.
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So the issue is, when i hit space bar on my desktop to view the image, I am now only seeing that piece that I was trying to copy/paste!!
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Old bug in Apple's preview and image file format code.
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My system: Windows 7 Professional, two Intel Xeon X5650's, 12GB RAM, and a NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800.
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PREVIEWS
Fast Previews: Adaptive Resolution Limit 1/4
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MEMORY & MULTIPROCESSING
RAM reserved for other apps: 4GB
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On my screen magnification ratio setting, I am using 25% and my Resolution/Down Sample is set to quarter. On my preview tab, I have tried setting my resolution from the default of "Auto" to "Quarter" with no difference.
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Under AJA Preview there are check boxes, one for "Video" and the other for "Preview." I've checked and unchecked them both and I'm still getting poor RAM previews. No matter what I have toggled, I seem to get between 1 and 2 fps for my RAM Previews.
I am not currently using the AJA card for anything. I will consider uninstalling it if this might possibly solve my problem. It's just a hassle to install and uninstall cards on a per need basis.
If there are any other thoughts, I'd love to hear them. At this point, I'd do just about anything to have realtime previews back.
The machine I'm using, by the way, is an HP z800 with Windows 7 Professional, two Intel Xeon X5650's, 12GB RAM, and a NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800. It has the following installed: CS5.5 Production Premium, AVID Media Composer 5.5.2, and AVID DS 10.5.1 (among other programs).

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.
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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.
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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.
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PP CC & AE CC: Windows lose focus, AE stops playing RAM preview

I'm experiencing very odd behavior when I have Premiere Pro CC and After Effects CC open at the same time. Please let me know if there is any additional information I can provide to troubleshoot this issue.
Symptoms:
I'm working in Premiere Pro CC and After Effects CC and am noticing some very odd behavior where I'll be working in an application (any Windows application) and the Window will lose focus. For example, as I'm typing this question, the window will periodically lose focus, and I'll have to wait a second to start typing again.
Another Symptom is that I'll be in After Effects CC, I'll press 0 to do a RAM Preview, but AE will stop looping for some unknown reason. It's never at the same time and it's always intermittent.
Obervations:
This only happens when I have both After Effects CC and Premiere Pro CC open at the same time
With Sysinternals Process Explorer Open, I notice that CEPServiceManager.exe (Adobe CEP Service Manager) opens as a child process of Adobe Premiere Pro.exe. When this process is open, I experience the symptoms described above. When this process stops, the symptoms stop.
I think there's only an issue when the PP CC project has a linked AE comp in it.
Steps to Reproduce:
Windows 7 Utlimate x64 SP1.
Open Premiere Pro CC and Create a new Project
Open After Effects CC and create a new comp.
Save the Project in AE CC.
Add a solid to the comp.
Save the comp.
Drag the AE Comp to the PP CC project.
Make a change to the AE Comp.
Expected:
Windows behaves normally. After Effects behaves normally.
Actual:
Symptoms occur as described above.

harcnowhear wrote:
- Even when video is rendered to a .Mov Lossless file the video is still juddery and appears to be dropping frames when played in Quick Time - VLC is better slightly.
That is to be expected (unless you have a RAID setup for your computer's hard drives). An uncompressed HD file has a data rate that is much too high for your hard drive to handle. If you take that high data rate file into the Adobe Media Encoder and render it into a deliverable format such as H.264, it should play back without issue. If this is the case (and I'm pretty sure it is), this is unrelated to your RAM preview issue.
What version of AE are you running? You say CC, but is it 12.2.0 or 12.1.0? If you haven't yet, update to the latest version; it fixes a lot of bugs.
Also, when you say you've been using AE version 5 and 5.5, do you mean CS5 (actually version 10) and CS5.5 (actually version 10.5) or do you really mean you're using the really old versions?
harcnowhear wrote:
We have an older mac here which has an older card with more ram (1024 MB) on the card, which takes longer to render the preview (is that due to less system RAM?)
Rendering speed usually has less to do with RAM and much more to do with the processor's clock speed. This is likely the difference.
Is this older Mac running CC or is this the older version you mentioned in the "Extra notes" section?
Have you tried updating the driver for the graphics card? The GPU has very little to do with rendering in AE (except for the Ray-Traced renderer, but that doesn't matter as you don't have an NVIDIA card), but it does have to do with AE's display of its playback.

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

Super slow audio RAM preview issues in AE CS5

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