Stop adding new features till the program works at an appropriate speed.
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.
Nick Dorn
shared this idea
4 comments
-
Jordan Cadby
commented
NICK!
that is well put... I could not agree more. -
Jess McMillan (AE Dev @ Adobe)
commented
Hello Nick,
For some applications I think it is for sure the right approach to start fresh and I appreciate your feedback in either case. Our team is working hard to update the application and I hope you have had a chance to check out our most recent release (AE 22) which has a lot of improvements to performance: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/whats-new.html
The beta application is also a great place to get involved with the team and be involved in the process of shaping the future of AE https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-beta/ct-p/ct-after-effects-beta?page=1&sort=latest_replies&filter=all&tabid=discussions
I hope you continue to engage with the team as we move towards improving AE for the future.
All the best,
Jessica -
Nick Dorn
commented
Jess McMillan, the applications that cause the most pain are the ones its used with most, premiere and encoder. simply put, encoder isn't a very good idea, it's just one more place for the data to route through for actual output- that introduces slowdowns and bugs. It's far worse with premiere. as I said, the amount of data that needs to be processed and sent is inordinately large- and because we always push our hardware to the limit, linking footage is largely infeasible, if you mean to provide viewport previews at least- it causes redundancy- two programs needing to work at once, on the same thing, or two separate programs that need to have the same functionality to provide the same result from a single set of data. It would be far more helpful to link a filename in a folder, and occasionally check the file's last version and reload if it's been changed. None of this would be an issue if rendering and effect computing was faster in the first place, though!
It's an issue that most of the addons... shouldn't be addons. https://www.schoolofmotion.com/blog/after-effects-plugins pretty well states it. you need to know the basics before plugins will actually help, so not only is is hampering artists, but the learning community as well. Blender has a great way of handling this. Most plugins are turned off by default. it's easy to turn them on, but new users don't open effects and see an CVS receipt of proprietary and confusing names like lumetri, keylight, cineware, and so on. Many of the addons actually provide VERY IMPORTANT functionality. these should be merged with the program's main codebase, to facilitate optimization.
but the main concern here... is that it's just been developed too long. it's like league of legends' player say. "it's been patched so much and is so convoluted, you'd have better luck optimizing spaghetti- every bugfix adds an exploit or breaks something else" and while after effects... almost works... the fact of the matter is I can't actually make money with it any more, so I have to consider it a deprecated part of my workflow and offload the costs to my clients, so they can buy me a month or two of it. I have to tell people that "their prices are exorbitant, but because your files are already in this format, you don't have a choice. I'll do it from scratch in something else, and it'll cost less. and take less time, but then you might not be able to find another editor who uses these other tools, as they're not a monopoly."... and I'm not joking. people pay me by the day- and my cost is a minimum of 2 days: one to be paid, and the other to pay for the program.
another part of it is your obligation to your clients. The primary expectation clients have for the service's promised features (Access to well-working programs, with meaningful updates, new useful features, intuitive UI, and performance improvements) is not being provided in a satisfactory way, while prices for those unsatisfactory services and client dissatisfaction is mounting.
After effects is old, its most powerful tools have been deprecated and replaced with tools that are too sluggish to be worth the convenience. so- deprecate after effects, and make After Effects 2. I know it hurts to hear that as a dev. I'm a dev too. it breaks my soul a little every time I need to start a vfx scene from scratch, I learn a program I've been writing will never be feasibly efficient because of the library I built it on, that a game I've worked on for 3 years had to be scrapped.
it hurts. but in the end, the second try always ends up better than the first and easier to make, even if it's less nostalgic.
-
Jess McMillan (AE Dev @ Adobe)
commented
Hello Nick,
Thank you for your post.
Just curious if you have tried the beta application recently? We are actively working on performance there and as things become ready, they will be moved to the release version.
Information can be found here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/multi-frame-rendering.htmlOn going discussion and updates have been posted in this thread over the past several months:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-beta-discussions/multi-frame-rendering-is-here-aka-the-multithreading-you-ve-been-asking-for/m-p/11885358#M533With the new beta there are preferences for setting the resources you would like AE to use which I would expect would help your focus issues where AEs performance is decreasing and a min/max boosts it temporarily.
Hope this helps sort out those performance issues you have been seeing. And if not, it would be great to get further into the details of what version you are using as well as what your system hardware looks like?
Which applications do you use with AE that give you the most pain points?
Thank you for taking the time to reach out to us.
All the best,
Jess