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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects S-l-o-w RAM Previews

  • S-l-o-w RAM Previews

    Posted by Jeff Hinkle on October 19, 2009 at 6:24 pm

    Hopefully someone wiser than me has a possible solution to this problem. We have an Intel Power Mac, Dual 2.8GHz Quad Core, 10 GB RAM, OSX 10.5.8. Running After Effects CS4 and it simply cannot play back any RAM preview in real time. Even a simple one-second 720×480 29.97fps comp of a square solid moving around the corners nets a playback of about 8 fps, even at 50% size and half resolution. I’ve tried restarting, rebooting, trashing the prefs. Playback is set to Computer Monitor Only, Adaptive Resolution is set to 1/4. AE is recognizing 8 cores, 10GB of RAM installed and appears to be taking the 3.0GB max.

    A co-worker just told me that they’ve never had a realtime RAM preview on this machine, so it’s apparently not a new development. Anyone have any suggestions for a solution? I’m willing to consider anything up to and including voodoo at this point.

    Michael Szalapski replied 16 years, 6 months ago 4 Members · 4 Replies
  • 4 Replies
  • Jeff Hinkle

    October 19, 2009 at 7:08 pm

    Yup. Zero on the numeric keypad. Shift-zero to get every-other-frame RAM previews, which doesn’t help a bit.

  • Ryan Mcafee

    October 19, 2009 at 7:40 pm

    Just throwing this out there. Are you running any other programs while AE is open. I know I have trouble when I run Illustrator or anything really.

    When anything is competing with AE, AE seems to get a lil buggy.

    Ryan McAfee
    Moon Community Access Television
    http://www.MCA-TV.com

  • Kevin Camp

    October 19, 2009 at 9:31 pm

    it turns out it was an aja plugin that seemed to be interfering with both ram previews and processing/performance (despite video preview being set to computer only).

    once the aja plugins were uninstalled it worked fine (of course all kinds of other things were done in the process of figuring that out, so it could have been a combination of changing slot assignments, updating software, drivers and removing those plugins).

    Kevin Camp
    Senior Designer
    KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

  • Michael Szalapski

    October 23, 2009 at 5:56 pm

    The AJA issue is becoming common. I had a friend deal with it on his Mac and at work we had an issue on both of our CS4 AJA Windows Vista machines.

    Removal of the AJA for AE fixed the problem on all of the systems. AJA’s put out some updates since we had the issue, so maybe that’ll fix it…

    – 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.

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