RAM preview in CC 2014 won’t play realtime

[Tim Bentley]

Is it just with a particular composition / project, or does it happen regardless of what you’re rendering?
16 GB isn’t a huge amount of RAM though, make sure you’re leaving enough free for other applications and that there’s not another application hogging it.

https://timbentley.info

[Ivan Ferenczsak]

It seems that it happens regardless of the composition or project. It’s not even complicated comps that I’m rendering now. Here’s a screenshot of my Memory and multiprocessing settings:

Sometimes it plays back as low as half the original fps.

[Tim Bentley]

Try turning off multiprocessing for RAM previews, I’ve got a similar spec laptop and multiprocessing slows down the RAM Preview considerably.

https://timbentley.info

[Ivan Ferenczsak]

I thought multiprocessing speeds up the RAM preview? Doesn’t make sense to me that it actually slows it down. I didn’t measure, though, I just assumed it would be faster this way.

But I still don’t see how this would affect playback AFTER the preview is already rendered into RAM…?

[Tim Bentley]

Hopefully someone who knows more than me about what goes on under the hood of AE will answer this, but multiprocessing basically opens multiple versions of AE running on different cores so it not only takes a while to start up but isn’t necessarily faster in all setups. Even on my workhorse computer I never have it set up for the RAM preview, it takes ages to start up and I’ve had similar problems to you in the (distant) past.

You could also try working in CC 2015 then only moving to 2014 for the final render, although 2015 has a few problems of its own…

https://timbentley.info

[Ivan Ferenczsak]

I’ve tried 2015 but reverted back to 2014 mostly because I couldn’t get the preview to work as I wanted it to, and since they completely changed the way it works in 2015 I couldn’t get my self to grasp it fast enough and I’m on a deadline so I just went back to 2014. Then I got this new problem with playback not being realtime and it stuck ever since. I really hope someone who understands these processes better will read this soon enough. Thanks for your input anyway.

EDIT: one thing that’s also driving me nuts and happens often, is that after finishing rendering to RAM, if I click away it immediately discharges the RAM, green bar vanishes, and there’s no blue bar either, so nothing is cached to disk even… and then I have to render to RAM again. Those things make working in AE almost impossible 🙁

[Ivan Ferenczsak]

HI Dave, thanks for the reply. I got a decent machine so I don’t see how the hardware could be the problem. Here are the specs:

Core i7@4 GHz
16 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 (4 GB)

I know that 16 GB is like a bare minimum for AE, and when I got no other Apps running I got around 10 GB of free RAM. I really don’t see how this could not be enough to render a comp 10 sec in duration and then to play it back realtime.

Another issue I’ve been having is, when I render out a RAM preview, it usually does play in realtime first time, but then when i click away, the green bar just disappears! And there’s no blue bar either, like nothing is cached to disk even….

This has been bugging me for days now, but haven’t noticed it before in AE, not on this neither on other machines.

[Nick Patten]

Hi try emptying your cache in preferences. Also do you have an external ssd drive for your media and cache? If not that will cause sluggishness

[Ivan Ferenczsak]

I tried emptying the cache before and it didn’t help. The cache is set up on the same SSD as the OS…so that is what’s causing the problems?? I got another SSD with second OS (dual boot setup) and maybe I could make a partition for the cache on that one…what would be the optimal size of cache for AE?

[Ivan Ferenczsak]

Sorry folks but I really need to bump this thread… still searching for the solution, so ANY answer is more than welcome!