ram preivew stops halfway through for no reason…?

[Darby Edelen]

It stops for a very good reason: there isn’t enough free RAM to hold any more frames in your Image Cache. This can happen a lot if you don’t have very much RAM on your system or if you’ve RAM previewed in a lot of different comps or if you’re doing anything that limits the amount of RAM available to your Image Cache. You can go to Edit > Purge > Image Cache to delete all of the images cached in your RAM and start fresh.

Also, you can make your RAM previews longer by using Shift-RAM Preview (Shift-numpad 0 by default) to skip every other frame (I also like to set Shift-0 to render at half res). If you’re rendering at a lower resolution you’ll be able to fit more frames in your Image Cache and if you’re skipping every other frame that will effectively double the length of your RAM preview. The downside is that you’ll only get a rough motion preview without all the detail that will be present in the final render.

I recommend setting your RAM Preview and your Shift-RAM Preview to render from the playhead. This way you can preview your comp in sections, using Shift-RAM Preview when you only want to see the way things are moving and RAM Preview when you want to check for details.

[David Lieberman]

thanx for the help. i got 2gig of ram… this never happnd before, using much more complicated animation than this one…

tried purging but that doesnt help either…its really weird..could it be my preferences at all?

[Darby Edelen]

[shroomly] “could it be my preferences at all?”

Check your RAM/Cache preferences, I like to have about 60% available for my Image Cache.

[Kevin Camp]

is there anything different about this comp than previous comps? are you working with a higher frame rate or larger frame size (hd perhaps)?

those factors can dramaticly effect the amount of ram used in a ram preview.

you might also double check the ram preview options in the time controls window, make sure they jive with your comp settings, if it was set to preview at a higher frame rate it would require more ram to render. also make sure you don’t have any other apps open that might be drawing resources away from ae. rebooting can often help with unexplained oddness associated with software/computer problems, if you haven’t already tried that one.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Micz Kicz]

I had the same situation moment ago. CS6, Corei7, 16 GB of RAM… and RAM preview stops at no reason on about 1 minute. Also RAM preview was very lazy – even rendering single flat jpg layer in low resolution took very long to render and failed to render completely.

My solution was to reinstal drivers for Nvidia GeForce 560Ti to previous version (301.42), but that was not it. Then I have turned OFF multiprocessing in AE (Edit > Preferences > Memory & Multiprocessing > Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously) and that solved the problem. My version of AE is: 11.0.2.12

Still I find it very odd, since my system HAVE the multiprocessing power… but – as it seems – not for AE.

Creative Creature 🙂