AE CC 2017 full of bugs

[Tim Kurkoski]

Sorry to hear you’re experiencing this problem.

Is this on Mac or Windows?

In Preferences > Audio Hardware, what are your settings? A screenshot would be useful here.

If you change this, does the buzzing, and/or the crash go away?

[Michael Litty]

I’m also finding Ae 2017 to be unusable. I had to upgrade because I was having issues with my installation and had to reinstall.

I opened a project from the previous version of Ae CC and it was converted for 2017. Playback of the 20 second long project causes the program to bog down horribly and audio playback sounds delayed and distorted.
System: Mac Pro Mid 2012
2x 2.4 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon
64 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC RAM
NVIDIA Quadro K5000 4096 MB

internal SSD drive with external for media.

AE Settings———————–
Audio Hardware:
Device Class: CoreAudio
I/O Buffer 1024
Sample Rate 44100
“Attempt to force …” unchecked.

Video Preview:
Enable Mercury Transmit (unchecked but I’ve tried both with and without and had the same horrible results)

end AE Settings ——————–

More info.
If I create a new project and import the same audio file and only play that file back, it sounds fine. As soon as I create a comp with three text layers that have animated presets applied and a single solid with an animated backgroun preset, the whole thing bogs down after about four seconds of playback.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Hi Michael,

A few questions:

* In the Audio Hardware preferences, what is Default Output set to? A screenshot really would help here.
* What version of macOS are you using?
* Are you experiencing any other playback issues in either After Effects CC 2017 or CC 2015.3?

And is there any chance you could share a project with us that exhibits the problem? I recognize that you said you could reproduce it rather easily, but we cannot reproduce with that basic description, so it may be something specific to the files or settings you are using. Always best if we could see exactly what you’re doing.

[Tom Smith]

Hello Tim,

Thanks for looking into this! If I change the output I get no sound at all (the only other option is the built in speaker of the mac pro Tower). App crashes on every type of project: 2d animation, color correcting only, subtitles on a 1080p clip etc) here’s a screen of the audio preferences

[Bram Rusman]

I’m having the same issue. It seems that I can’t work at all with the updated version. Every time I press the spacebar, it just crashes. Even when I open a new project with just a single shape layer without animations, it keeps crashing.. I haven’t got the previous version of AE anymore.

Mac Pro (Late 2013)
Processor: 3 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon E5
Memory: 32 GB 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC
Graphics: AMD FirePro D700 6144 MB

[Michael Litty]

My audio hardware dialog

Video Playback settings

I had real time playback on an iMac with 16GB RAM and Ae2015 installed. The iMac was probably a 2015 model, so newer than the Mac pro but the Mac Pro has these specs and should handle this little project.

[Michael Litty]

This has been my experience with past versions as well and the behavior you describe is what happens on an iMac using the previous version of Ae. An iMac that I’ve used to work on this same project. The first time through, Ae is rendering the preview and it’s slow. On the second playback or loop through, the render is usually done and it previews smoothly.

With this new update, however, the playback never smooths out. Even after a few attempts. Letting it play through once or twice doesn’t help.

[Michael Litty]

I had no idea there WERE different preview behaviors. Seeing your post and did a little poking around and found this page which went into more detail about space bar previews vs. “proper” previews.

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/previewing.html

Still learning.

[Michael Litty]

I don’t see any terminology in the preview pane that designates “proper” previews but changing the preview settings to this seems to have fixed the problem! Thank you!

[Tim Kurkoski]

> May we assume that you’re aware that there’s no such thing as real-time playback in AE?

Dave, that’s at best misleading, and at worst completely false.

After Effects is designed to play back frames cached to RAM in real-time.

What tends to confuse this is:
– Bugs in recent releases of After Effects that cause real-time playback to not work consistently. With bug fixes in successive releases up to After Effects CC 2017, the remaining instances of these problems are fairly narrow, mostly macOS 10.11 and 10.12 with large screens. We are continuing to work on fixing this.
– After Effects is not designed to play back compositions in real-time _before_ the frames are cached to RAM*. While that can happen in certain cases, and the performance improvements made in recent releases actually make this more likely*, real-time playback is designed to occur once frames are cached to RAM.

* A major exception to this is an improvement in After Effects CC 2017, where many movie footage formats (QuickTime, MXF, H.264, etc.; but not image sequence formats like TIFF or EXR) can be played in real-time from disk, as long as no changes or effects or applied, and the overall machine performance and disk read speed allows this.

Saying that “there’s no such thing as real-time playback in AE” can mislead other people, especially those who don’t have as much experience with After Effects as you do.