[Paul Lexa]

i found it, in your ae preffs file (documents settings/user/app data/adobe/ae/..blabla adobe after effects preffs.txt) look for “Time needle update frequency (seconds)” and set it to what you want (i go with 0.01)

after all what ive tried, the only explanation i can come up with is that during first ae launch after installation, it sets these default preferences based on operating system/hardware (probably sees that i only got 4gigs and running win7/vista, so it tries to increase performance by drawing the playhead slowly lol)

i can finally sleep now, good game

[Paul Lexa]

managed to find it, so im gonna answer myself here just in case you wanna backup your custom toolbar icons layout and preferences, its stored in registry at:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Sony Creative Software/Vegas Pro/10.0/Metrics/Application
(The Application folder contains it all, so it can be exported for backup)

Keybinds tho (which are definitely more important), are by default stored in a file:
C:/Documents and settings/username/application data/sony/vegas pro/10.0/keyboard.ini

Location of the hotkey file can be changed thru the registry or the shift+prefferences secret menu within vegas

[Paul Lexa]

For backup and reinstall purposes. As i always customize my cg applications alot to speed up my work (loads of custom hotkeys for everything and shelves/toolbars for stuff that cant be hotkeyed etc) so i always make backups of hotkeys and preferences to make sure i dont spend whole day reconfiguring in case of fried drive or os reinstall.

I tried uninstalling vegas and deleting all its remains in programfiles and after installing it again, the toolbar and preffs were kept.. so it has to be somewhere outside of it.

Thanks for the internal preffs tip by the way, good stuff, i didnt know that and i will go through the options there later, it might help me solve other things like setting frame number offset and padding when rendering image sequences

[Paul Lexa]

ok done some more testing:
it happens with both cs4 and cs5 on both win7 and vista (both 32/64bit, tried ultimate and home basic) and same thing on another computer (with completely different hardware and drivers)
The os instalations were completely fresh, literally just os and AE, I then tried drivers, qt, os updates etc, still jumping.

So its not hardware/AE related and basically is fine in xp and wrong in all versions of vista/win7. Its my first time using an OS newer than xp so i might be missing something which i didnt need to install in xp.

Getting used to it but its a mystery. Also, could anyone confirm that they are indeed getting a smooth cti movement in vista/win7? I dont wanna spend more time on this to find out that its supposed to move like that

[Paul Lexa]

Yeah i saw your thread and there was one more from 2009, im gonna try to ask adobe tech support if theres any, and do some more testing, ill look into it later. I mean this problem isnt really slowing me down much as there is much better ways to sync animation to audio than eyeballing based on playhead position during playback but theres surely times where it can help to see cti precisely. (and as far as audio in ae, anything helps really heh). Its just annoying when something isnt working the way it should and the way i was used to it

[Paul Lexa]

That was one of the first things i tried, but this doesnt really seem to be hardware performance related problem unless im really missing something else 64bit related.
When i watch everest during the simple comp realtime playback (in the video), cpus dont go above 20percent and theres plenty of free memory. Even some heavy comps which i can run close to realtime or do a ram preview (with alot of free ram still left), the playhead will still move jerky even when everything is basically cached and is displayed realtime. Also all my comps run significantly faster now than they did in winXP. (the hardware is the same)