After Effects Jittery Play Back

Adobe After Effects

After Effects Jittery Play Back

Posted by Josh Booth on January 31, 2012 at 2:20 pm

Good morning everyone! I need of some assistance here. I am working on pretty simple animation just sliding PSDs in and out of a 1920 x 1080 frame at 29.97fps and I have this horrible jitter on the images. This problem is evident in RAM previews and exported Animation Quicktimes. I have trashed prefs, tweaked memory and multiprocessing settings and tried different images. Still the problem persists. Unfortunately, this is a big project and a new job so I need to get this figured out sooner than later.

I’m feeling like it is a graphics card issue. I installed DaVinci Resolve lite yesterday and I kind of think this started around then. Resolve installed CUDA and some other BMD stuff. I tried to uninstall CUDA, but it doesn’t appear that I was successful.

My system details are as follows:
MacPro 2 x 2.66 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon
48 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB
Mac OSX Lion
Adobe CS5

Any ideas, suggestions or compassionate encouragement would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Josh Booth
Animation/Film Director
innis maggiore
4715 Whipple Avenue NW
Canton Oh 44718
330.492.5500
http://www.innismaggiore.com
positioning is our position.

Josh Booth replied 14 years, 3 months ago 2 Members · 10 Replies
10 Replies

Michael Szalapski
January 31, 2012 at 4:35 pm

Did this same project (with no changes) used to play back with no problems? Your description sounds to me an awful lot like judder. [link]

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
Josh Booth
January 31, 2012 at 4:38 pm

Yeah. Things played back okay before. Thanks for the link, but I reviewed it quite a few time yesterday and I don’t think it applies to this situation.

Josh Booth
Animation/Film Director
innis maggiore
4715 Whipple Avenue NW
Canton Oh 44718
330.492.5500
http://www.innismaggiore.com
positioning is our position.
Michael Szalapski
January 31, 2012 at 5:04 pm

Have you tried testing the playback on another system?
AE doesn’t use the graphics card to do any rendering (barring a few third-party effects). If it’s a graphics card issue, it has to do with the playback and not the rendering.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
Josh Booth
January 31, 2012 at 6:01 pm

Thanks for the suggestions. But I don’t think they have help. I am running AE 10.0.2.4. My RAM preview is playing back in real time and the problem persists at 50% resolutions.

The Animation Quicktime I output is only 10 seconds long. So, I don’t think it is choking the system.

The “jitter” is mostly around the edges of the PSD file. And on the text baked into the PSD. Right, now I’m cleaning up the PSD to make sure the edges are nice and neat, but I don’t know what to do about text.

Thanks for the input though. I appreciate it!

Josh Booth
Animation/Film Director
innis maggiore
4715 Whipple Avenue NW
Canton Oh 44718
330.492.5500
http://www.innismaggiore.com
positioning is our position.
Michael Szalapski
January 31, 2012 at 6:06 pm

Actually, I’ve seen playback of 5-second animation codec videos choke a machine. Uncompressed HD has a very high data rate and usually can’t play back smoothly unless the system has a fast RAID setup.

However, since you mentioned that you see the issue in RAM previews as well, that’s not your issue.

Have you tried playing a RAM preview of it on another machine? If you don’t have AE on another machine, try compressing the video to a playback codec and putting it on another machine and try that.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
Josh Booth
January 31, 2012 at 6:16 pm

Rendered out a H.264. Played it back on a different machine same issue is present.

Josh Booth
Animation/Film Director
innis maggiore
4715 Whipple Avenue NW
Canton Oh 44718
330.492.5500
http://www.innismaggiore.com
positioning is our position.
Josh Booth
January 31, 2012 at 6:19 pm

The problem is there with or without Motion Blur. Also I tried putting a soft Guassian Blur on, but no improvement.

Josh Booth
Animation/Film Director
innis maggiore
4715 Whipple Avenue NW
Canton Oh 44718
330.492.5500
http://www.innismaggiore.com
positioning is our position.
Michael Szalapski
January 31, 2012 at 6:35 pm

Any chance of a project file?

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
Josh Booth
January 31, 2012 at 6:36 pm

send it to you?

Josh Booth
Animation/Film Director
innis maggiore
4715 Whipple Avenue NW
Canton Oh 44718
330.492.5500
http://www.innismaggiore.com
positioning is our position.
Josh Booth
January 31, 2012 at 6:57 pm

Dave,
Thanks for the help, but still making now progress. I think I’m going to see if the IT guy can roll the machine back to before I installe Resolve. This started right around then.

Thanks again!

Josh Booth
Animation/Film Director
innis maggiore
4715 Whipple Avenue NW
Canton Oh 44718
330.492.5500
http://www.innismaggiore.com
positioning is our position.

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