Troubleshooting

Startup and rendering

Premation cannot start

At launch Premation starts its engine. If the engine cannot run on this computer, the app shows a dialog titled Premation cannot start, names the reason, and then quits:

The Premation engine could not start on this computer: reason

Reinstalling Premation or updating the graphics driver usually fixes this.

The reason is one of:

There is deliberately no software renderer to fall back to: the app tells you instead of showing you a blank stage.

The engine stopped

If the engine process stops while you are working, the editor keeps running. Electron main restarts the engine and replays your recorded edits into the new one — after a short wait that grows from a quarter of a second to a second to four — and a toast tells you: “The engine restarted (crash); N edits restored”. The viewport may say “Waiting for the C++ engine’s first frame…” for a moment. A hung engine (one that stops answering) is treated the same way as a crash — but since 1.0 an engine that is merely busy drawing a heavy frame is not taken for hung, and edits that were in flight when it stopped survive the restart.

If it stops three times within a minute, Premation stops restarting it and shows an Engine unavailable dialog: The Premation engine keeps stopping. Editing is paused. It names the reason and offers three buttons:

Save the recovery copy first if you can. If it keeps failing, note the reason the dialog gives and what you did just before, and report it — an engine that stops repeatedly is a bug, and a specific layer, effect or file is often the trigger.

It is slow

Turn on the viewport HUD (View ▸ Viewport ▸ Performance HUD) to measure rather than guess: it shows fps, frame time, cache state, video memory and the graphics backend. Then, in order of effect:

• Turn on Draft 3D if the scene is 3D — ambient and key light only, no shadows, SSAO, depth of field or reflections. For a heavy lit scene, lower the shadow-map size or turn ambient occlusion off in Composition Settings ▸ Renderer.
• Turn motion blur off while working.
• Reduce particle rate — remember it may be keyframed, so check the keys before you export.
• Lower layer quality switches.
• Lower the viewport’s preview resolution. Auto does it for you: since 1.0 it drops a step only after a sustained slow run (ignoring the first couple of seconds of playback, while caches warm), restores no sooner than a few seconds later, and switches at most once every ten seconds — each switch costs a moment, so it no longer pumps back and forth.
• Cache the stretch you are working on: View ▸ Cache ▸ Cache Work Area Now. Cached frames play back at full rate.
• Update the graphics driver.
• For footage, generate a proxy. ProRes and DNxHR have no hardware decoder on Windows GPUs, so they decode on the CPU.

One enormous layer is missing from the frame

A layer scaled so far that it is larger than the GPU’s maximum texture size cannot be drawn. Since 1.0 the rest of the frame still renders — before, the whole frame came out blank — and the layer’s error list says why. Scale the layer down until it draws again.

It bounced me to the login screen

The companion server is not reachable, or your session has ended. In the installers the dashboard and editor are behind a sign-in. The local edition, built from source, has no sign-in at all — see First launch.

Animation

My two keyframes overwrote each other

Keyframes live on the layer-local axis, not on composition time minus clip start. Two keyframes that look a frame apart on a stretched or time-remapped layer can be the same instant on the layer’s own axis. See Keyframes.

The whole text layer fades at once instead of per glyph

You have keyframed the animator’s transform offset rather than its range selector’s offset. Animate the selector. See Text animators.

Overlapping layers go see-through when I fade them

You are fading them individually, so the overlaps reveal. Pre-compose them and fade the pre-comp — nested compositions render to their own framebuffer and composite as one unit. See Compositing.

It rotates around the wrong point

Move the anchor point — the Pan Behind tool (Y) moves it without moving the layer, and the Anchor Point row in Properties ▸ Transform takes exact values.

3D

The scene went flat when I turned on 3D

There is no light in the composition. A 3D layer with no light renders unlit. Layer → New → Light…. See Lights & materials.

The 3D switch is not offered for this layer

Shapes, solids, text, images, video, SVG, nulls and composition layers take it. Groups and adjustment layers do not, and neither does a composition layer with Collapse Transformations on — its layers are spliced into the host and meet the host’s camera themselves.

The camera tool does nothing

C is only live when the composition has a camera and at least one 3D layer. Otherwise it falls through harmlessly.

Layers are drawing in the wrong order

In a 3D composition, depth beats stack order. Check Position Z, not the Layers panel. See 3D layers.

Rigging

The puppet or bone tool is greyed out

They need a riggable leaf — a single shape or image layer. For a group or a pre-comp, use Rig Logo for Animation from the command palette or the layer’s right-click menu. See Rigging a logo.

The mesh came out as a rectangle

The mesh is generated from the layer’s alpha silhouette. Artwork on an opaque background has a rectangular silhouette. Remove the background.

Import

The footage looks soft in the viewport but exports sharp

That is a proxy doing its job. The asset’s proxy row says in use when one is being substituted, and substitution never reaches output. Turn the global proxy switch off to judge the picture at full resolution.

A 4K clip scrubs at a few frames a second

Jumping around a long-GOP clip means decoding forward from the previous keyframe, and that cost grows with resolution. Generate a proxy for the asset. If the clip is ProRes or DNxHR on Windows, note that those have no hardware decoder and always decode on the CPU.

The clip arrived four times the size of the frame

That was the old behaviour and is fixed — footage auto-fits on import. For an existing layer, run Fit to Comp; fit is a command you run, not a setting that persists. See Importing media.

Frame blending does nothing on a mismatched frame rate

Blending brackets on the source’s rate, which comes from the import probe. If ffprobe could not run — the installers ship ffmpeg but not ffprobe, so it runs only where one is found — that rate is unknown and the blend has nothing to bracket against. Set Interpret Footage ▸ Conform frame rate to the real source rate.

The SVG animates in the Assets panel but not on the canvas

The Assets thumbnail renders the raw file in an <img>, and the interface plays SMIL and CSS animation there for free. The thumbnail proves nothing about the importer. Add it to the scene and press U to see what was actually converted. See SVG import.

My Lottie export is missing most of the animation

Lottie export covers vector shapes and transform tracks only. Rasterised effects, GPU filters, 3D lighting and video have no Lottie representation. See Lottie.

Export

Video export needs a repair

ffmpeg, which encodes MP4, WebM, MOV, GIF and the HDR formats, ships with Premation — but security software can remove or block it, or a disk error can damage it. Premation checks it at startup and before each video export, and says Video export needs a quick repair when it is not working. Press Fix, then Download and fix: the app downloads the same pinned build, checks it, installs it and tests it, and your export carries on. If the download is blocked, the dialog offers Copy download link and Choose file… instead. Stills, image sequences and WAV export in the meantime. The same check and Fix… are in Window ▸ Customize… ▸ Appearance ▸ Video Export. See ffmpeg & codecs.

An export failed with “The disk is full” or “open in another app”

Free some space or choose another drive, or close the file in the other app, then press Retry on the failed job. “Premation can’t save to that folder” means the folder is not writable: export again to another location.

The export produced nothing

It should not have — every path asserts on a real frame count, and a zero-frame encode is an error rather than a black video. If you got a file with no content, that is a bug worth reporting.

Before exporting, scrub the export preview in the dialog: it renders real export frames and reports empty ones before anything is written.

The export does not match the preview

This should not be possible — the viewport, the export preview and the encoder are all fed by the same engine. Three things that are expected:

• Library and template card thumbnails are small previews. They show geometry and timing, not necessarily every filter.
• Draft 3D is a viewport-only toggle; the export always renders at full fidelity, so the export will look better, not different.
• Viewport aids never reach a file: the Viewer LUT, a layer set to Wireframe quality, guide layers, and the dimming of other layers in Focus Mode are all viewport-only.

Generate Captions from Audio says there is no hosted route

The published installers cannot transcribe yet. See Captions.

The VU meter is empty

It only draws while playing, and it is hidden when there is no audio path. An absent meter means “no audio path”, not “silence”. If previews play through the wrong speakers, choose the device in Window ▸ Customize… ▸ Audio.

Plugins

My project says it has missing plugins

Some effects or layers in it come from a plugin that is not here: a native plugin that is not installed, not loaded or switched off, or one from the JavaScript/WGSL plugin system that was removed in 0.9.0. Since 1.0 that content is kept: the effects pass through, the layers from old plugin layer types draw nothing, and a save writes everything back unchanged. Install the native plugin and it comes back; content from the old JavaScript system will not render again. See What happened to the old plugin system.

A native plugin is listed as Failed

Open the Plugins panel (Window ▸ Panels ▸ Plugins) or Dashboard ▸ Plugins ▸ Installed. The reason is printed on the plugin’s row. The usual causes are a manifest that does not parse, a bundle with no binary for your platform, or a plugin built for an SDK this Premation does not accept — another major version, or a newer minor one (“needs SDK 1.x”). None of the plugin’s code has run in any of those cases. See Plugins.

A native plugin is listed as Quarantined

It brought the engine down the last time it ran — by hanging, or by a crash that could not be contained — so the engine will not load it again on its own. Update or remove the plugin; switching it off and on again in the plugin list retries it. Its author can retry it with premation-plugins --enable while testing.

A plugin says “Requires Premation Cloud”

It is one of Premation’s own plugins, which come with Premation Cloud. Until the plan is active its effects pass through and every value stays in the project. After upgrading, press Check plan on its row and restart Premation. See Premation Cloud plugins.

A plugin is listed as Revoked, or will not install

A revoked plugin is on the store’s signed revocation list and never loads. An install is refused when the package’s signature does not verify, when it is signed with a different key than the copy you already trusted, or when it has no build for this computer; the dialog says which.

A server render refuses my project because of plugins

Plugins run on your computer only, so the hosted renderer cannot draw them. Export the project from the app instead.

An effect from a plugin does nothing

Check that the plugin is Loaded and not Disabled, Failed, Quarantined or waiting for Premation Cloud — the effect card says which. If it loaded and one layer’s effect is doing nothing, that instance may have been disabled after a fault: the layer renders as if the effect were off, and the failure is recorded on the layer’s error list. The rest of the project is unaffected.

Still stuck