Kill after effects. it's done and dying, and no computer can run the buggy, leaky, bloated mess any more.
I have a workstation- it is not a beast.
I was working with several layers of 6k anamorphic footage in 2016 without buffering.
fast forward to 2022. I can barely mask 1080p footage without making coffee while it buffers for 3 minutes.
the solution? just... make a new one. invest maybe a few million of those 15.79 billion in profits last year to making new, performant, decent software.
I'm not disparaging adobe for making money or being profitable. I'm unhappy because adobe is running a service, and the implication of providing a service is that said service is provided.
https://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects.html this page lists a number of features provided with the service. half of them are simply not true, others are debatable at best.
so, yes! I believe adobe after effects is now a scam. I wish it weren't true, but I've been using the same computer since 2017, and I can tell you- performance has gotten worse, workflows have gotten obfuscated and slow, new features are either unusable or worthless, the program does not play well with other programs, and multiframe rendering provides nearly no functional difference to performance.
If there has been any improvement in speed over the last 7 years, it's due to hardware improvements alone, as my hardware has barely changed, and I have never once seen a speed improvement since CS4. (and I have been using adobe products since CS2)
I no longer use after effects, except to access old reels from 2020 or prior.
FIX IT, ADOBE.
...man, after effects and premiere used to be fun to use. They were a joy. now they're infuriating, tedious, and useless.

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Joe D commented
Until After Effects can playback footage in realtime, unfortunately it's not fixed.
Nick and a lot of us are hoping for something beyond what After Effects can currently offer. I'm sorry to say.
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Antoine Autokroma.com (Independent Developer of AfterCodecs, BRAW Studio, PlumePack, Influx) commented
Interesting Stevens, It would be great to have more feedback from users for what they think about After Effects v22 (2022) and MFR (Multi Frame Rendering). From my side, I experience less bugs than previous versions
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Steven Probets commented
For me the current version version of After Effects is the most stable and a performance king - more so than it has been for a long long time! Premiere seems to be a lot more stable but missing lots of time saving changes.
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Nick Dorn commented
@Filip Vandueren
I just meant iphone resolution and similar video files, not prores-I don't often use it anyway, phones have totally progressed faster than performance improvements in AE, but- just saying, most other programs that can take prores can play it in realtime, or near that so long as there's no effects, all the way to 4k. that shouldn't be a problem either. -
Filip Vandueren commented
isn't "iphone footage" the problem ? Or did you transcode it to prores before working on it ?
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dsr nyc commented
That sounds like a YOU problem.
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Nick Dorn commented
yes, yes I have tested them, that's part of my grievance here. the acceleration is limited at best compared to what it was previously, and the primary limitations of the program stem not from the speed at which it renders, but how it seems designed to poke at every bottleneck inside a workstation.
Ram is the most damning. it just uses all of it, whatever it is, and when you max it out the program grinds to a halt.
Then you have all the plugins that are 8 bit after 30 years of development.multithreading is only really used on a per frame basis, meaning that because cores can't work together on harder frames, removing a lot of the benefit of doing it in the first place. who cares about rendering 17 frames at once when no matter what you can't get playback till the slowest one is done? even cores that have nothing to do won't help.
and for the cherry on top, CUDA integration is such that the moment it reaches 90-95% GPU use, your display itself begins dropping frames and AE won't accept a button press when you're lagging hard, if you can even move a cursor whose speed changes randomly dependent on any spare GPU/CPU core available for a moment.
maybe it should be made known to people in the adobe system- that anywhere else, 32 gigs of ram is more than enough for anything but the heaviest workloads, whereas here, 64 gigs of ram is barely enough to work on some 25 second iphone footage if you're lucky.
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Antoine Autokroma.com (Independent Developer of AfterCodecs, BRAW Studio, PlumePack, Influx) commented
Did you test the latest updates of After Effects with MFR ?