After Effects finally needs a competitive 3D Realtime Engine (GPU) for 3D compositing and virtual workflows of the future. The Link to Cinema is too slow, complicated and unstable for simple 3D compositing tasks. So it needs something like "3D Elements" on steroids and native in AE.

Dranging some 3D Assets into AE, add some effects, tweak and light them, is a must have in 2022. Compositing, Motion Graphics and VFX are not only 2D/2,5D! - they happen now also in 3D and Realtime!

What this new real time 3D Engine needs:
- 3D Geometry Support (import/export)
- PBR Shaders
- Link to Substance Painter/Designer
- Primitives' and very basics modeling (box, spline) and deformer Tools
- Raytrace Lighting, Reflections (GPU)
- Support of 3D Volumes and Point Clouds (vdb.)
- Camera Mapping Tools
- Advanced Camera Tracker (more manuell control, constrains, import/export)
- Smart 3D Particles with Physics (node editor)
- VR HMD Support

thx

PS: I wirte this since years. please don't delete my requests again.

After AE got that nice update with track mattes I think it may be the time to take another great step and make many more the properties mappable.
This will definitely require a new dialogue window, where you can bind a comp layer to virtually any parameter and set the remapping ranges applied to the pixel data. The current property mapping approach is very limited. Imagine if you could map any of the AE's blurs' radius, or the stroke radius/color/softness, or the glow's brightness/radius/color, or you could even drive the main layer properties like position/rotation with an animated texture. This would give A LOT of creative and technical freedom to us!
By now there's a small selection of the properties that can be mapped, this entire approach would completely replace those dropdowns with a new interface, and all the properties would have a new internal property of being mappable, like now they have the animatable property.
I am attaching the image demonstrating the general idea. I think these new settings can live in the new properties window as well.

I'm tracking footage as I write this. the entire file is just a single 4k video with two trackers. my cache is on an ssd, and I run a 1070 and 6700k intel chip. not the best, I know...
bit it worked fine on 6k anamorphic video in 2016 when I made it. so now I get to say:
what the hell adobe. how did you mess this up so much, the moment you went subscription?

it's simple. after effects has become like 3DS max: buggy, cobbled together, filled with half-functional plugins, all with messy code and badly integrated, with no guide to keep the UI functional or intuitive. All the bulk makes it hard to update, hard to run, hard to work with, and hard to debug.

We're aware Adobe doesn't care about artists. They care about bad managers who think addons are a replacement for actual workflows, or that bells and whistles improve the quality of work above a mastery of the basics. The result of this, is that every update comes with new plugins.

We're going on 500 plugins now... and it's beyond silly at this point, as I use maybe a total of 5 to 10 in all of my workflows combined.

also, the "cross applications workflow tools" suck. they're far less effective than just throwing a pen drive across the office. These aren't small files. syncing them would take hours my dudes. even just from program to program is slow, clunky, and unreliable to the extreme. get it together, adobe.

I tracked 29 frames in that time. now I just minimize and maximize all my windows... and it speeds up 1200%. seriously. if I didn't know the workarounds I would be at breaking down the doors of their offices right now for selling this at absolutely eyebrow-singing prices.

I find that since audio is typically only referenced in AE rather than edited, I am often having to look for and manually disable all video clips that contain audio tracks within the project. This leads to recurring accidents of having surprise elements of audio in my renders and additional needless labor.

The alternative, to me, would be to have an option in preferences that, by default, disables the audio of video layers that contain audio tracks.

Please note that these audio channels would remain present and could manually be turned back on within the timeline.

This is only in regard to the speaker icon audio enable / disable switch of the layer once in the timeline.

Audio-only files (wav, aif, mp3 etc) would remain to default to the audio channel being enabled on that layer.

I think this approach would result in overall less clicks by all users.

The new extended viewer is a great addition to the program, nice being able to see outside of the viewer frame! It would be amazing if this was an option for a 2D workflow, there's definite benefits for being able to have vision of what's outside the frame

A workaround for those who like this as well, you can create a simple 3D layer and hide it. It will allow you to still use the draft 3D mode to have the extended view enabled for your 2D layers. Not sure what impact it would have on performance though having 3D enabled!

I'd like to report an issue we are facing since After Effects 22.4 and 22.5 (it doesn't affect AE 22.3) on two different workstations running macOS 12.4 Monterey.
This, by the way, doesn't happen on a windows 10 workstation.

The problem is easily reproducible. In a project, create 3 compositions with different aspect ratio, 1920x1080, 1080x1080, 1080x1920 .
When you queue the composition in this order 16:9, 1:1, 9:16, the last rendered (9:16) seems to be squashed in a 1:1 ratio, with a green rectangle at the bottom.
When rendering in 16:9,9:16, 1:1, the last rendered (1:1) outputs to a corrupted file. I'm rendering to prores quicktime files.
I uploaded a frame from the wrong the 9:16 output.

Menu bar and all right click dropdowns are not working in AE 2022. You click an item in the menu bar and nothing appears, you click again and it shows up for a moment but disappears when you move your mouse over to click on a drop down item.

When you click for the first time, you can click on drop down items by guessing the approximate location of where they are but they are invisible so it's a guessing game.

This makes AE completely unusable. Fixes when you delete your preferences file but it is not feasible to delete all my workspace preferences every time this bug comes up, and it always comes back.

This video from another user with the same issue shows the problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6kHnkX-3BQ&feature=youtu.be

We commit lots of RAM Previews daily and oftentimes, we view a RAM preview on repeat. Going from Zero to when the RAM Preview is ready for viewing takes x number of seconds. Oftentimes, we can make do without a full, fps preview when we just want a quick look to ensure what we're doing is going as planned - things moving in the right direction; general layout looks as expected and layers are looking as expected. For this, a RAM Preview in 2s or 3s is sufficient. However, user experience can be improved if we combined these truths with a new performance feature, Incremental Iterative RAM Preview.

The premise is the have the first (or as few as possible) RAM Preview viewed in 2s/3s and while the user views a repeat/iteration of the RAM Preview, AE continues processing the in-between frames and automatically plays back a preview with more frames, closer to full fps.

To make this more work in a more user-friendly manner; in the Preview Panel, place the Skip Widget to the right of the playback buttons and to the right of the Skip Widget, place a checkbox to enable Incremental iterative RAM Preview. This checkbox is greyed out until the Skip Widget is great than 0 - just to make matters more salient to the user.