RAM Preview in CC 2019 Won’t Play Realtime (59.94fps)

[Eric Santiago]

You would need the big box HPZ840 fully loaded to even get that kind of preview.
But I’ve easily killed them units by adding plug-ins and layers.
You just need to be mindful of what you need to see.
There are options such as Region of Interest that could also help.
I for one live on a Mac Pro 2013 D700 with 64GG RAM on massive RAIDs.
I still need to be very selective when dealing with preview.

[Mike Jennings]

Wow. 2160p@59.94 is pretty exotic. Uncompressed and assuming you’re only at 8-bits-per channel…

3840 [frame width] * 2160 [frame height] * 8 [bits per channel] * 3 [channels per pixel] * 59.94 [frames per second] = 11,931,992,064 bits per second. Divide by eight and you have 1,491,499,008 bytes per second. Even getting Premiere to play a single layer of uncompressed video at 1.5 gigabytes per second would be pretty impressive. After Effects? Forget it.

Even if you’re using one of the many formats that run video at less than fully uncompressed rates, it’s still going to be a tall order for something like After Effects that wasn’t designed for realtime anything. And the raw brute speed of the storage subsystem and the amount of RAM you need on the graphic card for that is daunting, as is moving all that data across the system busses… it’s kind of dizzying to think about.

[Steve Bentley]

Speaking of region of interest, that too used to be a good trick to get real time playback out of a section of a comp that was too big to do so when viewing the whole thing. But as of AE2017, I”ve noticed it doesn’t seem to make a difference. And if you monitor ram usage, it’s nearly identical, whether you are using ROI or not. Did something change?
I’ve experienced little difference in both, comps that have lots of little elements all over the place (only the elements within the ROI should be heading into ram) and in comps that have large comp-spanning elements that will get loaded into ram no matter what, since at least part of them is always in the ROI.

I’ve also always wanted to know the difference in the memory management between AE and platforms like Nuke, Fusion and Flame/Inferno, as these are able to play much larger uncompressed comps back in real time. Back when, I always assumed that it was the SGI magic pixie dust that made this possible, but now, everything is on PC’s so that playing field is leveled. And if there is a big difference in software only why hasn’t AE made better strides in this area?
Even back in the I’m-too-embarrassed-to-say-how-long-ago, Jaleo was playing 6 streams of uncompressed HD (6x186mB/s) overlaid and composited in real time (no rendering required) while AE was still struggling to play/cache 1 stream of SD (without special hardware) – about 30mB/s. (to be fair that was partially an SGI aided accomplishment, but still, the difference is staggering)