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I am at a loss: The Preview Function
I am an experienced AE user. And I am completely flummoxed by the Preview Functionality.
Issue 1:
Here I sit with a timeline containing one piece of Pro-Res422 pre-rendered video, one piece of WAV audio and nothing else. No adjustment layers. No effects. No layer styles. No motion blur. Nothing.
I can grab the playhead with my mouse and manually scroll through and see the video smoothly. But when I hit the spacebar and try to see a full, low-res preview with audio, first it just sits there for about 10 seconds, then it starts playing one frame every five seconds. And it seems to get worse and worse to a point where I can’t get any preview at all and end up just closing AE, rebooting and then trying again. Which works until it slowly gets worse and worse again.
Now….let’s be clear. I am running AE 25.3. I have uninstalled and re-installed. All updates are installed on PC and Video Card. I have 64 GB Ram and 100GB set up as for disk cache on the same drive AE is installed on, which is an SSD drive. The footage is 1080p. The preview is set at 1/8 resolution. (Yes! 1/8!) All disk and memory cache have been cleared. I allow it to cache into RAM and have a full green bar above the footage. It should just play smoothly, right?
My sticking point is what I stated in the third paragraph, that I can grab the playhead with my mouse and manually scroll through and see the video smoothly. So the frames are cached and viewable. Why doesn’t preview work?
I will also mention, that once in a while (like once in 50 tries) it will work beautifully. Hit preview and get a low-res, smooth preview with audio. But this never lasts long. After two or three of these tries, it goes back to long pauses and stilted, jerky previewing.
I am now spending hours on something that should take five minutes. Or worse, rendering something (that takes hours) only to find something wasn’t synched up right and I couldn’t tell because I could never get a decent preview.
Any ideas appreciated.
Issue 2:
99% of the time, even when I have the preview set at a custom 1/8 resolution, the preview shows at 1/4 resolution. I know my custom 1/8 resolution works, because as mentioned in Issue 1, sometimes the preview works beautifully, and this includes seeing it in the custom low resolution. But this is so rare and I wonder why it just ignores my setting most of the time.
Again, any ideas appreciated.
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7 Replies
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If you open the Info panel and watch that when you tap the spacebar, you’ll see the issue, After Effects has to cache audio each time it previews. So the first 10 seconds is it compiliing (probably not the right word) the audio file so that it can play it back alongside the cached video.
I don’t think there’s anything you can do about it, although WAV files are not compressed as MP3, so I think they take less time for preview playback.
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This sounds right, but if within the Preview Info Panel you disable video and preview only audio, you get an instant, quick, real- time preview. At least on mine.
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That’s very true. I’ve no idea why it works the way it does, just that’s what the info panel says.
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hey Daniel, please send a screen recording of your issue and i’ll be happy to send you a solution that works 100%, talk soon!
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Thank you for your offer. Although I’m not sure what you’re asking. A video screen recording showing nothing happening?
Please clarify and I will make sure to check back so it isn’t months between messages.
Thank you.
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Unless I am missing something, your response was blank.
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