Reduce After Effects Pricing (grievances list) (it's 30 years old, visible depreciation in value and usefulness, AE needs replacing)
it's in the title. it's mind boggling to me that the program still works, let alone can be in some ways considered stable, but let's face it:
multi-threading use is spotty at best
GPU usage remains under 10-30% on most GPU's
many plugins aren't even 16 or 32 bit
Export templates are no longer standard, can't export in several standards
almost entirely uses RAM for viewport acceleration instead of optimization
by default now uses 429 plugins instead of optimized, built in features
mixed support for different GPU architectures (mostly older ones)
CPU/RAM/GPU usage are all far higher per calculation than the competition.
almost 0 3D integration
unstable, inaccurate tracking
almost no way to work interchangeably with 3D software
only dying legacy support for modern cross-platform standards
workflow discrepancies between a number of standard plugins
3D is essentially unusable, and always has been.
RAM usage is extreme, to the point of reaching several operating system limits easily.
The UI, as nice as it used to be, is dated and unintuitive by modern standards.
and so on. It's been 30 years, and this Ship of Theseus has been taken apart and put together so many times the boards are worn and the lumber different, and the ship is taking on water (and leaking memory in no hypothetical manner). it's just not holding up. It used to be photoshop, but for video. Now it's... frankenshop, for VFX. After effects just hasn't caught up with the times.
I've been using AE since CS2, I've been here since the golden days, but even then, there were weird things that didn't make sense, plugins that didn't follow, or contradicted normal keymaps, things like that. I understand- it's hard to maintain something so big. That it's old is no issue to me. That its age is limiting its usefulness is.
sometimes, it's just time to drop the project and try again from scratch with what we've learned. If anyone knows that, it's a VFX editor.
Nick Dorn
shared this idea
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Justin Hemsley
commented
Same here. I've been on the Ae train since v5.5! Pre CS, pre CC, just plain ol v5. I've spent so many hours making art with this software over the past couple decades and it saddens me to see my old friend slowly sinking into uselessness. More and more over the last several years Ae has been the source of much stress and anxiety. I've nearly missed some huge deadlines due to bugs and crashes, and ridiculously long renders that rival even the heaviest of CG or fluid sims. I understand that there is so much inside this program that is difficult to change or upgrade. That does not change the fact that many of us depend on a functioning tool to feed our families. AE seems to function less and less with each update. I watched a podcast with Corridor Digital talking about some possible solutions that really resonated with me. I think it is time to build a fresh new tool with a modern architecture. It's a great tool and has so many strengths, but it needs to perform like a racecar not a sinking ship.