Dear Adobe,

Me again.

Please stop everything that you're doing with the development of new bells and whistles and doodads and put all your resources and firepower into resolving the years-old issue of the Slow and Laggy Interface in After Effects. Seriously. It's been YEARS. I kept thinking, "ah, they'll fix it soon.." and hope for the best and I end up feeling like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football every time a new update for After Effects comes out. "Maybe they fixed it!" And it's still not fixed.

When I contact Support I'm told, "the issue that you are facing is a known issue and the same has been highlighted to the designated team who are working on getting the issue fixed in the future releases," but it has yet to be fixed.

Old After Effects was FASTER on OLDER laptops - I have been on modern workstation-build DESKTOPS that are slower in response. Makes me not want to work in After Effects. I feel bad for those starting out in motion graphics in 2020 and this is what they are introduced to.

SpaceX put two astronauts on the space station. Surely we can get a butter smooth interface in After Effects.

Thank you.

https://vimeo.com/441661685/b7aba12cba

Quite often when working with After Effects, especially character animation work, I will need to move a bunch of keyframes further away in the timeline so that I can add in an additional pose for example. This is made incredibly difficult as any new keyframe information that is added will try to move to the animation that has been moved further in the timeline. It would be incredibly useful to be able to select the keyframes and temporarily disable them so that you can focus on the new section of animation required then reenable the keyframes when the additional poses are worked out.

It would be extremely helpful to be able to define our own render tokens somehow. We often have very long and complex filenames that string together common elements like "Project Code," "Client Name," "Project Name," "Deliverable Name," "First/Last Initials," "Version Number", "Language"

It would be helpful to be able to define these somewhere in the AE project, perhaps as metadata, and then allow them to be used as render tokens/properties that can be used in the existing File Name and Location Templates.

Sure, we can manually enter this information ourselves when we go to render. We could also rename our comps this way (though comp readability would become terrible). But it becomes a chore when we have dozens or hundreds of files to render. It would help with quality-of-life and ease-of-use to be able to set up these tokens once per project and reuse them. Filenames and render folder locations would be much more consistent (even when sharing the project with multiple artists on different teams) and would require less constant fiddling to make sure we're putting things in the right place.

Being able to set a "Project Root Folder" for example would also address these other issues, where we want to render to specific folders in a folder structure and we don't want to worry about where in that structure the AE project itself lives:
https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911311-after-effects/suggestions/37543408-a-render-settings-token-that-allows-you-to-climb-u
https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911311-after-effects/suggestions/41679958-render-queue-remember-projectname-token-on-exp

Being able to set a "Version Number" would also address this issue:
https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911311-after-effects/suggestions/41125603-add-project-version-number-as-a-render-token-prope

CC composite is great for compositing its own layer over itself again, the track mattes is good for tracking an alpha/luma of a layer above itself.
However, many times I'd like to composite, say an icon, over a circle shape - then animate each one independently (perhaps the circle scales up and the icon slides down to the centre of the circle), then, have the icon track the circles alpha channel so you only ever see the icon inside the circle.
Set matte doesnt often work as you are manipulating transform properties, and set matte seems to only work when both layers are the same dimensions or their default transform properties otherwise the matte is out of alignment.

The track matte works but you have to duplicate the circle layer and put it above the icon, then alterations to the circle animation would have to be replicated (barring fiddly pick whipping).

So, the feature would be like a track matte for any layer, essentially (could remove the track matte switch).
I think it could be a setting or check box in the "Set matte" effect, simply "track matte" which would track any layers matte/luma etc, as it appears in the composition, like it has been pre-composed but without having to pre-compose.

I hope this makes sense.

since 2018, Ae has not been updated in relation to VR/360 workflows. Ae has limited VR effects and the VR Comp Editor workflow which is also very limited and delicate script and expression heavy process.

Ae should have a spherical camera, mono and stereo. this would obsolete the stiching workflow of VR Comp Editor and it's limitations. 3d plugins like trapcode or stardust are very breakable, also all the 2d effects won't work properly without the use of 3rd party tools and even then it's very limited.

these new technologies should not be left behind, there are great things motion graphics wise you could create in Ae for 360/VR, and also for compositing video.

here are a few for the features I am looking for in Ae, please write anything else in the comments:
1. spherical camera (mono and stereo, 360 or 180) with all the perks as regular camera (depth of field, not a script to connect cameras, no stitching issues)
2. more VR effects or a native tool for integrating 2d effects for VR/360

Add a checkbox or something to allow users to opt-out of the installation of Cinema 4D R21 when installing After Effects.

I already have a valid perpetual license for Cinema 4D R19 Studio. R21 is pointless as it only allows me to use a trial license or purchase a license. The application is useless for those who already own a commercial license.

To make matters worse, I must uninstall it every time there is an update for After Effects. Quite frankly, I consider it bloatware. It useless and it wastes space on my hard drive.

I understand that there are people who don’t already own C4D who would find this useful which I why I think the ability to opt-out would make both sides happy.

This is an Adobe CC wide issue but AE is where I notice it the most.

Please revert the icons to the multi-colored versions! It makes no sense to make them the same color when the "themes" break down beyond video and photo use. I used the colors to quickly locate the software I needed to open, now I have a taskbar full of purple and have to squint to tell which letters I am clicking on.

It seems like a very poor design choice that was likely made by the boardroom, not the creative team, and I beg you to change the icons back - or at least give US the option to have the multiple colors instead of mono-purple, which I'll add looks horrendous on a dark theme display.

UPDATE : This problem seems to happen mainly with the javascript expression engine (and not the legacy extendscript expression engine)

Hi everyone,

We've noticed a weird RAM behavior in After Effects 2020 (17.5.1 - Build 47) and Media Encoder (14.0.1 - Build 70). When closing and opening a project multiple times, After Effects’ RAM usage is continuously growing especially when the project contains expressions (even the simplest one). Closing the project and purging memory (and Disk Cache) do not reduce the RAM usage! The only way to make the RAM usage drop seem to be closing After Effects! The same problem exists when sending these projects to Media Encoder. The RAM, used by the After Effects sub process under the Media Encoder main process, continually grows and does not drop even when the rendering process is complete.

We already know that expressions can be RAM consuming but the fact the RAM is not freed after the project is closed seems not normal.

We tried to reduce the case to the simplest situation and made a benchmark. The details of our benchmark can be found here :

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NEiyg-mKzBIOBioCOGqoJT4_DDG-U4Tf5dgrNbnXI-o/edit#

The quick conclusion is that after 20 openings of the simplest project (one comp > one solid layer) the difference in RAM between no expressions and 2 very simple expressions (basically setting the layer's position to its own position "transform.position" and scale to its own scale "transform.scale") was about 0.5 Go ! (2% RAM increase for no expressions and 74% RAM increase for the simple expressions) Again more importantly RAM that is not freed when the project is closed !

Is this a known issue ?

Thanks for your help.