

With the After Effects CC 2015 (13.6) update, you can configure the stop behaviors for each keyboard shortcut using new controls at the bottom of the Preview panel. These behaviors were not user-configurable. In previous versions of After Effects, including After Effects CC 2015 (13.5), the behaviors that occur when you stopped a preview were dependent on what type of caching was being used by the preview and what keyboard shortcut you used to stop the preview. To change whether audio is played when you start a preview, use the new Include Audio button, described below. It also enables or disables the Include Audio button for the keyboard shortcut that you used to start that preview. The Mute Audio button at the top of the Preview panel mutes or unmutes audio during playback. The remaining Composition > Preview > Play Current Preview command can still start an audio-only preview, if that is the current state of the Preview panel. To reduce confusion, they have been removed.

These menu commands, Audio Preview (Here Forward) and Audio Preview (Work Area) described behaviors that can now be modified in the Preview panel, now that the audio-only preview keyboard shortcuts can be configured in the Preview panel (see below). The Composition > Preview > Audio Preview commands is removed. This could result in shorter overall preview durations and also a longer pre-preview delay to prepare the audio (the Info panel displays “Mixing audio for preview”). Regardless of the range, longer audio durations require more memory to store the rendered audio for playback. The new Play Around Current Time range option is used to emulate the behavior of the Audio Preview Duration preference. When audio must be rendered for a preview, it is now rendered for the duration defined by the Range control.

This option conflicted with the Range option in the Preview panel. The Audio Preview Duration control in Preferences > Previews is removed. If you Option-click (Mac OS) or Alt-click (Windows) the Reset button in the Preview panel, Cache Before Playback is enabled for Numpad-0. This option is not enabled by default for any of the preview shortcuts. However, note that frames are not displayed to the Composition, Layer, or Footage panel as they are cached.

This behavior is similar to how RAM Preview behaved in past versions of After Effects. When this is enabled, After Effects caches frames before starting playback. In After Effects CC 2015 (13.5), the Preview Favors Frame Rate mode kept the screen display cache for all cached frames, which was inefficient and could result in an unexpectedly short preview duration.Ī new Cache Before Playback option has been added.
