After Effects 2023 - How To Fix Slow Preview and Lag - Potential Fix

In this quick tutorial I show you how to potentially fix slow preview or laggy playback in Adobe After Effects 2023. The first step is to go to the preview panel and change the skip from 5 to 0. This tells After Effects to stop skipping frames during playback, making the preview much faster and smoother. This may not work as well on older computers.

#aftereffectstutorial #aftereffectsfixslowpreview #aftereffectsfixlag

[michellenoirstudios]

Here are some more tips I learned right after watching this video.

In the preview menu, you can also do the following things:

Cache Before Playback - this ensures you have basically something rendered to view so it isn't as choppy when you're playing back your video for preview before official release. It takes a few seconds longer, but I highly recommend this at least for lyric videos and set Play From to Current Time with 3 seconds Preroll and Postroll for best effects. Also Set Range to Play Around Current Time with those settings. It helps give the computer the minimal amount needed to prerender so that you can view small parts of your video efficiently with ease. Also, I did this with Camera Lens Blur on my live action environment video plus moving text animation on top, took me less than 30 seconds for a 3 second render to view preview, just so you know what I'm dealing with.

I found that my Skip was already set to 0 when opening my comp, so this was no issue for me.

I hope I explained this well. Let me know if it helps and if you have any questions. You can view my lyric videos on my channel if you need an example of what I'm talking about.

[WizardOfAuxDJ]

Found this a little later than I would have liked but it worked like an absolute charm THANK YOU!!

[DemianVenzke]

Thanks! I had this issue as well and turned the preview/skip to 0. Now it works again. Had this issue after updating to AfterEffects 2024.

[LAGxKALON]

I've been agonising over this jittery playback issue and all it turns out was I need to turn skip to 0. You're a life saver!

[liammacleod]

My MAN! I'm in AE all the time and was non stop trouble shooting this with no luck. Thank you for the solve. 🙏

[damontheman]

Damn, it actually works, I've called Adobe service, went to their forum, checked all the youtube videos, after a year and some I finally found this and it solved my problem, thank you so SO MUCH, instant sub!

[battlepast]

as an avid creator and hobbyist gamer who edits a lot for work and play, WOW THANK YOU. great tip! funny enough, it was set to zero and I bumped it up to 5 to improve my preview speed. was literally snail pace but skipping frames made the preview playback (albeit choppy) like 3x faster. BLESS!

[wildfornothing]

Thank you so much! Subscribing because you literally saved me. You rock!

[samuelarias]

i spent a lot of hours looking for a solution for this, thank you!

[tiffervisuals]

CURIST I COULD KISS YOU!!! Thank you so much for this, brand new M3 pro and out of nowhere my project preview became so choppy I could not work properly (making a lyric video so precise timing is key) and this is the ONLY solution that helped me. you're the man!

[SaturdayAdventures]

This has been driving me nuts since my most recent update. Thank you!

[diegokramer]

You are a GENIUS! I even bought a new external SSD and this is what really helped me!!

[timotmon]

Moving Keyframes in AE '23 is really cumbersome for me. Anyone else have the problem? The whole UI just lags in general. I'm not on a slow system either, Ryzen 5900X, RTX 3090 64GB ram.

[roon_sharma]

Mate - you just saved my career. Appreciate you.

[SaraPerez-mkwu]

THANK YOU MUCH! Editing was a nightmare for months...!!

[RespxctFPS]

thank you so much this was a lifesaver!

[hammadiqbal]

thanks alot for the help, it worked for me

[marcmclaughlin]

It worked for me. thank you so much!!!

[ibrahimssa]

Damn mine was set to 0, I've got a 16 core and its crazy slow while preview rendering.

[chfilm]

wow- I just got a new mac studio m2 ultra and it was doing the same stuttery playback. oddly, skipping frames WAS set to 0, but changing it and going back to 0 fixed it. Must be a bug! Thanks a lot! /edit- it's back after a few seconds. Damn.