Slow preview with Adobe After Effects CS6

[Walter Soyka]

[chi hui yang zhang] “Hi – I’ve recently purchased AE CS6, and built a PC just for it, with absolutely NOTHING ELSE in it. And yet, still no realtime preview @ around 10 fps (!), what’s worse, it’s not much different from my previous old computer with 3G RAM and no graphics card…..”

AE doesn’t do much in real time on any computer — it’s not built for that.

Press 0 on the numeric keypad to initiate a RAM preview instead of pressing the Spacebar to play.

8 GB of RAM is not all that much for AE; with a quad-core system like your’s, I’d be looking at 16 GB as a minimum, and 24 GB would be preferred.

Since you’re new to After Effects, I’d recommend the following link, in which Adobe’s Todd Kopriva pulls together some important introductory materials:
https://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2010/01/getting-started-with-after-eff.html

I especially recommend the Video Copilot “Basic Training” series that Todd links to.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Like Walter says, AE is not expected to have real-time previews. Adobe recommends at least 12 GB for average performance.

Also, make sure your read files are on a separate drive from the page/cache drive. This is also a bottleneck.

https://wolfcrow.com/blog/ – Workflow information and support for filmmakers, photographers, audiographers and videographers.

[Anthony Surrell]

I did almost the same thing. Built a 3770k with 32GB Ram, SSD which flys overall but with CS6 I notice that when working with large projects whenever I press RAM preview – it takes 20-30 seconds to just start rendering the content, when it does it goes quickly but it’s very frustrating when making lost of little changes. I ended up killing the disk cache because it was even slower (had it on a 7200 drive).

I can tell you that the I also had an ATI video card in my old rig, which doesn’t use the GPU for acceleration…nVidia “Cuda cores” make a difference. I went with a $200 GTX 660 with a good number of cuda cores and enabled the hack for GPU acceleration and it was a world of difference.

I don’t expect to get my problem solved as almost every issue I’ve ever had with AE over the years usually ends up with a non-answer or blaming my system in some way that later proves incorrect.

I agree that RAM is crucial, all 32GB gets sucked up for even the smallest HD projects, might look at getting another SSD for the disk cache as it seems like a good investment for the bigger stuff.

[Walter Soyka]

[Anthony Surrell] “with CS6 I notice that when working with large projects whenever I press RAM preview – it takes 20-30 seconds to just start rendering the content, when it does it goes quickly but it’s very frustrating when making lost of little changes.”

Is it hanging on “Initializing background processes?” It can take a while to load multiple instances of the renderer and load all the necessary footage for each instance. What are your Memory & Multiprocessing settings?

Also, sometimes MP seems to get a bit stuck. A reboot can help.

[Anthony Surrell] “it’s very frustrating when making lost of little changes. I ended up killing the disk cache because it was even slower (had it on a 7200 drive)… I agree that RAM is crucial, all 32GB gets sucked up for even the smallest HD projects, might look at getting another SSD for the disk cache as it seems like a good investment for the bigger stuff.”

Making lots of little changes is where the disk cache really shines. The disk cache writes loads of little(ish) files, so an SSD will be dramatically faster than a single 7200 mechanical HD.

Using more conservative MP settings (or turning off MP entirely) will free up some RAM and enable Ae to dedicate more RAM to caches instead of footage and image buffers for the other render instances. This may speed up your lots of little changes scenarios.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Anthony Surrell]

I’ve turned off Disk cache and MP entirely and it had no affect on the project. For new projects, it performs instantly. I believe this project might be a problem because mid way through I realized it was just going to be too large for AE on it’s own (10 min project using 2 hours of footage) and starting use Premiere which of course was much easier. Seems I’ll just have to remember to not drop large files into AE. Thanks for help.

[Walter Soyka]

[Anthony Surrell] “I believe this project might be a problem because mid way through I realized it was just going to be too large for AE on it’s own (10 min project using 2 hours of footage) and starting use Premiere which of course was much easier. Seems I’ll just have to remember to not drop large files into AE.”

Ae handles large files just fine — it’s probably the complexity of the edit that’s posing the problem. Ae is not an NLE, so editorial complexity like that could result in very large AEP files (which will in turn slow down MP quite a bit). Moving the edit to Premiere sounds like the best approach!

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Mohammed ismail Shah]

Hi,
Just checkout your comp frame-rate and your ram preview frame-rate. You have to keep it same.
For Example if your comp is running on 24FPS then your ram preview speed is also has to be 24FPS.

Mohammed Ismail Shah.