[Steve Roberts]

Guess I’d better earn my headness, then: Composition>Save RAM preview.

🙂

[Steve Roberts]

I like my problem better, sadly.

Can you save a RAM preview?
Have you tried rendering to a different codec?

[Steve Roberts]

I’ve noticed some strange RAM preview behaviour with DVCPROHD footage. Occasionally, frames appeared with slightly raised brightness and lowered contrast, but the renders were fine. Just to be sure, I converted the footage to 8-bit uncompressed for now.

Your situation may be related.

(MacPro, CS3)

Once I have some time, I’ll do some testing.

[Steve Roberts]

Can you use another app to convert the footage to, say, uncompressed 8-bit, before importing into AE?

[Steve Roberts]

Yes, that’s a must-have. Thanks, Peder — you make great stuff.

[Steve Roberts]

Thanks, Ron.

[Steve Roberts]

Call Adobe. They used to have a crossgrade policy, similar to an upgrade policy.

[Steve Roberts]

After Effects Classroom in a Book.

After that, get the books by Chris and Trish Meyer.

And read the manual. It’s actually not that bad.

[Steve Roberts]

Nucleo Pro should help, but I haven’t tried it with CS3.

If you’re still not pinning your processors at the max, you can try the old trick of rendering to still sequences with multiple instances of AE:
https://generalspecialist.com/2006/08/ae-render-in-background-work-in.asp

You have to render to stills using this technique, with “skip existing files” on. I recommend rendering to stills anyway in case of a crash, since you have no margin for error.

Of course, hide AE or use caps lock so AE doesn’t have to refresh the screen.

Hope that helps.

[Steve Roberts]

I was just going to suggest that! (yeah, right)

Thanks very much for posting the solution, John.