AE 2019 Preview Renders Unusably Slow
For some reason, comps in After Effects are spontaneously vacillating between previewing smoothly with almost no stutters, and suddenly screeching to a crawl, making it impossible to work even at quarter view. The comp is composed of simple 2D layers, and my machine is more than capable of rendering the preview as it's running an i9 9900K, 64Gig of 3200mhz cl15 ram, SSD storage and a 2080ti.

The latest (November 2019) release of After Effects includes major improvements to our preview architecture. You should see reliable, real-time playback of cached frames.
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Raphael Schöning commented
Same problem here on two workstations:
One with latest version of CC2018.
Other with CC2019 (16.1.2)Tried a lot but only reducing to previewed comp works.
Using the pulldown menu or opening another window works too, but its not a sufficient solution.
Very frustrating! -
Eric Kreidler commented
That pulldown menu thing is crazy -- totally works. Drop down the file menu and suddenly the preview works. About to watch a Moho course due to ever more brutal AE performance. So frustrating and disappointing -- I wish I could just work in AE without constantly fighting the software.
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Ted Hoehne commented
Since updating to the latest build of AE (16.1.2 Build 55) my ram previews are again unstable at best (a problem I haven't had with a number of previous AE builds). I just tried the "touching/selecting the pull-down menu while previewing the RAM" and it worked... I get normal, smooth real-time ram previews if I have a pull-down menu selected, but as soon as I deselect the pull-down menu, the preview becomes stuttery and fall well below real-time. Definitely a problem with the build... not the machine. And, thanks to RYO for the "pull-down menu" trick... it irks me that I have to do that just to get a smooth preview, but at least I have a solution available that keeps me from going crazy :) After not having problems with previews for a good long while, I'm saddened to be returning to the point where I'm again desperately hoping Adobe fixes this ram preview problem with the next release of AE, and also hoping they don't break something else in the process.
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RYO commented
There are many cases where the RAM preview is not stable even with a composition that only contains sound files.
The solution is something I don't know about touching the pull-down menu while previewing the RAM.
Heavy projects have this tendency.
Save as cc2018 format and there is no problem with playback with cc2018.
It seems to be a problem with cc2019.iMac late2015 cc2019 RAM48GB
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grace commented
I have this problem too, no amount of troubleshoot seems to solve it. CC 2019 is being super buggy at this point. Even if preview render finally manages to work, a simple "Reload footage" on a single asset screws up the preview again.