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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.

https://vimeo.com/441661685/b7aba12cba

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Marc Trzepla shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

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  • Nate Foster commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    scrolling through the timeline is seriously laggy when there's a lot of layers and or masks. It's really frustrating.

  • Ojan Seyedashrafi commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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

  • Mauro Carrillo commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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

  • Michael Wilson commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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.

  • Robert Eggleston commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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.

  • Mary Taylor commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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.

  • Thomas Heising commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    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.

  • Nuno Ferreira commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    When I look 10 years back I do see a great evolution in terms of tools and features.
    Unfortunately, the software has stagnated in terms of performance and the time to produce simple content has practically no gains in terms of software efficiency and only gains from the additional investment in more powerful hardware on the part of users.
    This wouldn't be such a problem if users didn't have to pay so much money for monthly subscriptions.

  • Chris Phillips commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    +1. Every time new Nvidia drivers or a new After Effects version comes out I load it up to see if it's fixed and am always disappointed. I actually bought this PC to replace my Mac machine, but I wound up having to keep my older Mac because AE is so laggy to be unusable on PC. I think it's a high PPI issue on PC, but my Mac is high PPI as well and that is buttery. I find it incredibly hard to believe that they are not aware of this.

  • Brett Howe commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Hi all.

    I found this issue upon upgrade...and fixed it.

    Firstly I updated to the latest Video Card drivers. No change.

    I then explored plugin issues. Again, no change.

    As I had just updated using creative cloud, and it pulled my settings across from previous version, I figured maybe this was the issue. Something old holding things back.

    So in Preferences, Media & Disk Cache I hit CLEAR DATABASE & CACHE in the CONFORMED MEDIA section.

    It crashed AE. :|

    I re-opened it and did it again. After an eternity, it finished...and bam! No more lag.

    I can't guarantee this is the problem for all, but it fixed things for me.

    Cheers

  • Berislav Curić commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I have 2 workstations, on one aftereffects works PERFECTLY, on other one it's terrible. And I can't figure out the difference!!!!

    But these are two completely different workstations, in every aspect.

    we are missing the key information, it's something that affects the UI, something small. Let's find out what it is.

  • David Bixler commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    If you think it's a slag now, just wait. They just added Substance to their catalog of products to ignore.

  • John Myers commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Thank goodness we're paying so much monthly so we can watch nothing happen on almost every single request in here. If you check out the Premiere uservoice and sort by TOP you see their team at least has the decency to respond to the highest voted items. Unfortunately no amount of poking or prodding via social media or direct contact matters, Adobe always cuts/pastes "We'll check in with that team and hopefully fix that!"

  • Andrew Hoag commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    It's honestly mind-boggling how every release seems to add some features I have no interest in, but always breaks core functionality.

    I have regularly crashing CEP panels. Change workspaces? 15 seconds of locked AE windows, hoping a crash isn't imminent. Impossible to know what causes the issue, and that randomness of performance is even more concerning/frustrating.

    Resizing the main app window or panel is a nightmare right now. Often times I can't select multiple text layers and choose a different font family from the Character panel without AE completely locking up.

    For whatever it's worth: Windows 10 (20H2), AE Version 18.2.1 (Build 8). Ryzen 5950X with 64GB of RAM, two discrete GPUs (3080 and 3070).

    Here I am, at the end of another big client project having done the work - and the only thing holding delivery is another bug-ridden Adobe program.

  • spencer snygg commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I'm doing a rotoscope now. The RAM, CPU and GPU are practically not used (like maybe 30%) but *** is taking an hour for each frame. It started the process almost real time, but by the time it got 5 seconds in, it started slowing way down and is getting worse. Ideas?

  • Eddy Klaus commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I have the exact same problem. Laggy interface with shape layers. I work in cinema 4D with no problem at all, also in big scene files. But After Effects is so laggy as if im working on windows 95. Years and Years of monthly subscription and this is what we get. The experience with after effects is so frustrating sometimes. I used to love my job man, common.

  • Richard Veljkovic commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    It lags even on empty composition with nothing but text in it. 2K monitor here and i had zero of these issues in previous version of AE.

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