I see, thanks. Do you know of any new good feature you like since CS3 / CS6 ? That forces you to use latest versions

@Antoine Autokroma.com
it's less stable. I've been using it since CS3.
I know what it was like then, and I have old files. I can test old files, because I know how long it took them to export on an intel i7-870 and GTX 560 TI.
here's a hint- it took 45 seconds then. Now that I have an I7-6700k and a GTX 1070, it takes takes several minutes with multithreaded performance.

AE has gotten so much worse that I tripled my system specs, and the program ran several times worse, even then. I remember when I could track footage onto a 6k anamorphic video with 4 nested sets of sub-compositions, and export it in about 6 minutes in 2016. now it takes nearly an hour.

as well, the support for 3D is abysmal. there's basically no decent way to set up a 3D shot or effect, rendering 3D tracking useless unless you want to poorly composite some 3D object or text into the scene, without decent shadow catchers or lighting. it's dead in the water for everything but simple matte paintings. Now, though, I just use blender. so much easier to set up 3D there, and then I use resolve- its masking and color tools are mature and free, even if its UI is a bit clunky. at least it's not a good UI that can't run the moment you look at a tool with the intent to consider using it.

as well, the mac community (poor guys, misled by apple into thinking a 45w laptop CPU without a fan to cool it is a workstation card) is up in arms because it turns out after effects is super unstable and crashes or hangs constantly on things like adding text or resizing the window.

Even now, the UI becomes unresponsive whenever doing a track. I've had support watch it do a track, and they said "it was very slow for some reason", but after checking my specs, getting different GPU drivers, changing my cache onto an M.2 drive, changing my background services, RAM allocations, swap space, and after the guy helping started calling several other people to help- "that's as fast as it goes now" was the only consensus.

adobe's own support is in awe of the poor performance. I don't know what else to say. just let it die, let it shrivel up and die, and stop keeping it alive to milk people at rates they can barely afford, and that make freelancing and indie largely unworkable.

After effects is no longer a mature toolset. it's a decrepit, rusty one that was left in a puddle by its owner, and they expect me to pay for the honor of watching it fall apart as I work.

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

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.

@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.

isn't "iphone footage" the problem ? Or did you transcode it to prores before working on it ?

That sounds like a YOU problem.

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.

Did you test the latest updates of After Effects with MFR ?