I am trying to make a change from After effects to Blender for most things.
My biggest issue with blender is I don’t seem to see a way to “Ram preview”.
I have tried looking this stuff up but I can’t find a solution,
I am able to use the arrow keys to check frame by frame but I am unable to press play and have it play real time without rendering the whole thing, it’s as though it was made for compositing only still images and not animations and video.
Is there no way to do this ? Also I also find the audio does not play from the video so I need to add a speaker and add the audio separately which seems like a waste but it works
It seems impossible to composite effects to any kind of timing or to music for example because I can’t see the playback.
I have tried adding the scene to the Video editor but it just comes up blank and silent, Am i doing this wrong ?
There is no RAM preview or caching options in the compositor. The developers are well aware of this and will someday address it, probably by doing a complete compositor rewrite.
I just finished a feature film where I used Blender as the main compositing tool. I also come from a background of After Effects and Nuke, and completely understand the need to see your composite in motion to know if what you’re doing is working. The habit I got into was rendering my composite as a JPG sequence, then viewing that back in JefeCheck or DJV viewer. For long renders, I would set them up to render during lunch or overnight, then check in the morning. JPG sequences don’t take up much space, and when everything was looking good, I would render the final DPX sequence.
The VSE is ok for this but you must refresh it from time to time. Also use smaller project dimensions to get a longer cache.
The reason you may not be seeing the Comp Scene could be that your scene strip is still looking at the 3D view. Go to the VSE preview window properties and check that OpenGL is turned ‘off’. Also check that the Comp scene has Compositing turned ‘On’.
That is a shame well hopefully they create some form of preview, just make it so frustrating to work with timing. Might just need to edit all the different effects then composite all the edits together, then do a low quality render just to check it worked out.
Thanks, as long as they have it in mind and are working on improvements. Otherwise I really Enjoy the compositor! create for tweaking final renders, Just wish there were reasonable free alternatives to After effects.