Interface is Slow and Laggy
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.

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Justin Hemsley commented
this should be a priority fix in my opinion.
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Nick Dorn commented
hey, I'm just gonna put this comment here. my input.
https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911311-after-effects/suggestions/44254728-stop-adding-new-features-till-the-program-works-at
a lot of people are having this issue too. on this issue, I posted a comment with a list of other issues that are basically all the same thing. I figure if we band together we can get these issues commented and voted up high enough that they might consider acting on it if we, like, blot out the sun with sheer votes. many of these issues don't even have 10 votes. let's change that, even if it means AE is trashed and we need AE2. things are always better when you start from scratch to try again with what you've learned. also don't forget to wish AE a 30th birthday next year! -
Scott Crozier commented
I think there is some other type of font bug that is affecting people but think what the OP was highlighting is that even with a properly functioning font library AE is very slow to do basic operations on complicated projects where you have 20+ layers in a stack and try to do a box select of multiple keyframes the interface can't keep up. Ditto for just trying to scroll down through a large comp. I think this problem worsened once everyone moved to Hi-DPI displays.
From what I understand they are going to finally update the interface code so it renders smoothly but I'm not holding my breath.
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Josh Aarons commented
@florencia a
I was on a bit of a deadline so I removed or deactivated almost all fonts that were not relevant to my current project. It's extreme but it worked. I kept a backup of them and I will eventually re-add those fonts one by one and test. I hope that helps.
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florencia a commented
@Josh Aarons
Can you please explain your process? How did you know what to delete? Or you just deleted every free font? -
Josh Aarons commented
Unbelievably the font solution seems to have fixed my lag - for now. I can't believe that this is a fix. Shocking.
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Milan Nikolic commented
I was hoping maybe Win11 would fix it, I'm still on Win10.
But reading over the other users experience Adobe apps work 10-15% SLOWER on win11 :SS -
Justin Hemsley commented
@Milan I have a newer intel machine and it's just as bad. Old versions run smoother, even on my old machines. For fun over Christmas break, I booted up my 17 year old eMac running AE v7.0 (not CS, not CC, just good old v7.0) It ran surprisingly well withs it's 512MB RAM hah! rendered slow in a 1920x1080 comp, but the UI held up better than AE 2022. I even tried out v5.5 which was still installed, same story. Not sure where all this modern computing power is going... Makes me so sad.
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Milan Nikolic commented
Can relate, AMD 5950x with 128gb ram and the UI is more slugish than my 6 years old Intel machine.
Is it a problem with AMD processors? Anyone with new Intel generation can confirm this?
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Rombout Versluijs commented
See this with a lot of Adobe apps on Windows AMD machine. my 2009 mac pro runs smoother with older apps. Its just CRAZY!!!
Why do they keep adding new features when they lack to fix old stuff!!! How and why can product managent allow such a thing?!
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jakemorris111 . commented
This is crazy, deleting a bad FONT can fix this issue almost entirely. If you've downloaded a font from a free font website, delete it. That was the solution for me at least.
Credit to PM_ME_BRAUM on reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AfterEffects/comments/i9lbcy/ae_2020_ui_lag_is_just_too_much_for_me/
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riccardo garlato commented
Same on Adobe Premiere Pro, it became unusable
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Nate Foster commented
scrolling through the timeline is seriously laggy when there's a lot of layers and or masks. It's really frustrating.
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ido shor commented
this is ridiculous....
please, fix it already!
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Ojan Seyedashrafi commented
UI response issue is not limited to after effects it is true with premiere audition and photoshop even illustrator and as files are getting heavier its get more and more difficult to stuck with adobe and software we love, please adobe take a look at mocha and c4d and Autodesk softwares like flame and see what UI responsiveness are we talking about no one cares about 4 stream of 4k playback while stop and start button doesn't response instantly
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Mauro Carrillo commented
Rotoscoping should not take 30 minutes and/or a crash to do 2 seconds of work with 128gb of RAM, 3080 ti and i9-9900k
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Michael Wilson commented
It's even worse now that realtime rendering programs like Notch and Unreal are out there offering real-time compositing all on the GPU - fair enough they aren't as feature rich (yet) but on the other hand, you can output a 4k comp with multiple layers, loads of effects, processing, particles, real 3d in pretty much REAL TIME in Notch but then you take the sequence to AE to maybe tweak a few things and you're back to treacle time - eg today it was 20min to reexport a sequence that was <1min to render from notch. You guys are stuck with 90s tech in 2021. Sort it out or you'll be overtaken. (And you'll deserve it)
For the record I used to really like AE, I've been using it since the first PC version in the 90s! But it's going backwards at the moment.
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Robert Eggleston commented
You know what's the worst? The TYPING.
Can't even type in text layers without it skipping characters or requiring me to add extra spaces and then delete them for my recently typed text to 'refresh'.
This is happening to me on a maxed out Macbook Pro 16" and a Windows 10 machine with an i7 7700k, 32GB ram and a GTX1080 using an NVME SSD and a Samsung SSD for working files.
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Mary Taylor commented
I don't know what's happened with the updates as of late, but now both After Effects & Premiere are like working in molasses. I had to go back a few versions for it to get to working like normal again.
Update: I don't think that worked either. I am now thinking it is trying to make MOGRTS with expressions that may be slowing it down to a halt as the day goes on. But I don't think I'm using complicated expressions, so I don't understand.
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Thomas Heising commented
Working with shape layers and 3D is so embarrassingly slow. I am currently moving text around in a simple 3D space, and it is so slow. I have turned down the preview quality, there is not lighting nor shaders and it is still enormously cumbersome just moving and scaling elements.
As the original post says: please cease developing new superfluous features and make After Effects production-friendly.