[Paxson Woelber]

It will RAM preview, just not for more than a few seconds at full resolution, depending on the clip. I can RAM preview at half resolution, skipping 2 or 5 frames, just fine.

Anyway, thank you for the advice, I’ll try everything you mentioned so far, and I’ll repost the results.

Thanks again for all the help!

[Paxson Woelber]

Hey Kevin. The images are double the final resolution of 800×450. So, twice the resolution, four times the area. I can preview the whole timeline at full resolution. RAM preview at full resolution crashes.

The nature of the crash is that a static hour hand comes up and AE stops responding or indicating any kind of action.

And, if it helps, AE freezes no matter what kind of rendering I try to do. I’ve tried JPEG and TIFF image sequence exports, MPEG, AVI, etc. Always freezes at the same place.

[Paxson Woelber]

Thanks for the advice Kevin. The animation is entirely made up of images imported from Photoshop as PSD’s. Each scene is basically one image file, with the animation consisting of transformations to the layers and small-ish nested compositions.

Actually, the Particle Playground effects seem to render very quickly… it’s when I have nested compositions with the hue/saturation effect in play that things start to get slow.

The other thing that occurred to me is that maybe there’s a problem with the way I structured my compositions. I have one composition called “Main Timeline” that has all of the individual compositions on it, spaced out correctly as scenes. So when I play the “Main Timeline” comp, it basically just plays the finished animation. Is there a better way to do this? It seemed a little clunky…

Thanks again,
Paxson.

[Paxson Woelber]

For graphic design, at least as important as your machine is your monitor. Even the best laptop screens are really pretty poor compared to a decent monitor. The color accuracy just isn’t there.

So I would say that, unless you’re just designing for the web, don’t worry too much about your machine and focus instead on getting a solid monitor and color calibration tools.