blue/green bar when previewing composition

[zhanga49360355]

Hi, I'm new to Adobe After Effect. I dragged my stop motion sequence composition into a new composition, and when I press the space key to render for preview, the progress bar turns from green to blue, and it never finishes. So it plays the same fragment again and again. Do people have similar experience? Could someone tell me what's going on? Besides, it renders really really slowly.

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

The length of a preview depends entirely on the system resources, composition size, preview resolution and free memory. AE is not like a NLE which can playback one or two streams (HD) in real time on a fairly modest system. This is covered in any decent getting started with AE tutorial. You can increase playback time by setting the Composition Resolution to Auto and setting the magnification factor to 50% or 25%. You can also increase playback times by setting Previews to skip one or two frames in the Preview Panel.

One more important point. After Effects is NOT an editing program. It is specifically designed to create shots and short sequences that cannot be assembled in a Non-linear editor like Premiere Pro. Most comps should be a single shot. Most of mine are under 7 seconds. I worked on a project yesterday that was 40 frames. The shot was eleven seconds long but the only part that needed AE was 40 frames. To complete the composite I needed some motion tracking, corner pin tracking in Mocha AE, Cloning, some blur, a layer for grain and texture, in total 4 pre-comps and about 15 layers.

After Effects is an extremely complex app with hundreds if not thousands of features hidden in the UI. I suggest that you spend some time here learning the basics: Basic AE

Every hour you spend with a good vetted trainer, that's somebody that knows what they are doing and teaching, will save you 10 fiddling around poking buttons.

[Roland Kahlenberg]

To add to what Rick has already written, when you initiate a Preview in AE, rendered frames are loaded into frame and then played back from RAM. RAM is the fastest storage area on a computer; playing rendered frames from RAM ensures realtime playback of a Preview. Frames stored in RAM are denoted by the green bar/area in the Timeline.

When frames are unloaded from RAM, they are placed in AE's cache folder which you define in Prefs > Media & Cache. Cached frames stored in the cache folder are denoted with the blue bar/area in the Timeline. Rendered frames stored in the cache make it much easier for AE to recall them should they be required for another Preview, later.

If you are unable to Preview your entire Timeline or Work Area, then lower the Composition's resolution and/or zoom value. This will allow more frames to be loaded into RAM, to be readied for the Preview you initiate.

[zhanga49360355]

Thank you so much. I think I'll start trying to use premier pro cc for my stop motion project.