Menu bar and all right click dropdowns are not working in AE 2022. You click an item in the menu bar and nothing appears, you click again and it shows up for a moment but disappears when you move your mouse over to click on a drop down item.

When you click for the first time, you can click on drop down items by guessing the approximate location of where they are but they are invisible so it's a guessing game.

This makes AE completely unusable. Fixes when you delete your preferences file but it is not feasible to delete all my workspace preferences every time this bug comes up, and it always comes back.

This video from another user with the same issue shows the problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6kHnkX-3BQ&feature=youtu.be

I would love to see some additional functionality added to the Snapshot button in AE to make it similar to the Export Frame button in Premiere.

When working, I'm always taking screenshot of the active comp to send to people to take a quick look at what i'm working on. The downside to using a screenshot is that you get all the UI elements in the way, and it's not locked to the native size of the comp window.

In Premiere, you can hit a button that looks the same as the snapshot button in AE, but they work completely differently. It would be nice to have the ability to hold OPTION or SHIFT to turn the snapshot button into an EXPORT Frame button that had identical functionality as the button in Premiere.

As an added bonus, holding a different modifier and hitting the button could COPY the image from the current comp into the clipboard for easy copy/pasting between applications.

Video Copilot's FX Console provides a nice tool to work around this limitation for now. Would be cool to see this implemented as native functionality.

Thanks!

The new Render Complete Notifications are amazing for being able to take breaks, but they can steal focus far too often if rendering out comps that are fast - a couple user settable preferences would be incredible.

The following are my requests for options:
- allow the user to set a maximum frequency for notifications
- only notify on full queue completion instead of for each comp
- if a queue will take less than estimated [user input time limit], only notify on completion of full queue.

I could see these living in the Preferences panel, or directly in the Render Queue window

This request brought to you by my outputting roughly 1000 variations of the same composition with a 5 second / composition render time.

Shift Forward Slash still doesn't work 22.5.0.

Marc Trzepla
October 12, 2021

I SWEAR that if I was working in the Effects panel .. the Effects panel active ... I could press Shift Forward Slash to fit my comp viewer to All. Now I can't do that. In order to get Shift Forward Slash to work I have to activate the timeline panel or the comp viewer.

I know this has to have worked in the past - I apparently have the muscle memory of using it when the Effects panel is active because I keep trying to invoke it and my "why isn't this working" frustration is fairly recent.

Tim Kurkoski
October 12, 2021

Hi Marc,

Thanks for filing this bug. This is a known issue in After Effects 18.4. If the Composition or Timeline panel are not focused, keyboard shortcuts for zooming the active viewer panel do not work.

This has been in fixed in After Effects Beta (v22.1). Please install the latest build to confirm the fix. Apologies for the disruption.

Marc Trzepla
May 04, 2022

Not resolved - still doesn't work in v22.3.0

After Effects has a lot of plugins that can really speed up animator's workflows. When functionality is missing, plug-ins and scripts fill the gap. Unfortunately the After Effects SDK makes most helpful tools keep all of their functionality contained within a ScriptUI panel. This is fine for really big tools like Flow and Keysmith, where you want to integrate them into your workspace because you use them all of the time. However, there are a lot of "single-use" tools that only do one thing, but need a full ScriptUI panel to display a control of some sort. These can add up quickly and take up precious screen real estate for a program that really should be only a few panels.

I've attached a screenshot of how bad it can get, although I doubt anybody has actually gotten to this point. It looks like if somebody installed a million toolbars into Internet Explorer! It's got to the point that aescripts themselves have made April Fools jokes about it (Plug-n-telligence). You may think increasing the resolution can fix it, but even that doesn't fix the problem. Even a reasonable workspace can be a headache! This "ScriptUI ****" really comes down to 2 problems.

First, ScriptUI panels are allowed to be too big. A lot of scripts like to have big, cozy buttons that really don't need to be that big. Allowing us to manually set the scale of a panel could really come in handy. However, some script developers do take this into account and make buttons that can be small, like in Hylian and Mobar. The problem with these is that they need a title bar, which can often be bigger than the panel itself! Allowing us to hide a title bar for a panel or panel group would be really helpful in cutting down the size.

The other side of the problem is plugins that you don't need all the time, but are nice to have within reach, like EaseCopy, Hylian, MatchRate, Buttcapper, etc. Closing these and reopening them from a menu is inconvenient at best, especially if you have a lot of ScriptUI panels to scroll through. It's bad on Mac, but even worse on Windows where you essentially have to bang your mouse against the bottom of the list to get it to scroll. How can we solve this? It turns out we already have! In Illustrator and Photoshop, windows can be minimized to a sidebar and popout when needed. This would be helpful when, say, editing text. I don't always need font adjustment, but it'd be nice to have in an easy-access panel without having to re-enable the panel. I don't always need the Effects panel since I mainly use FX Console but a list comes in handy cometimes. Maybe we could make contextually-aware panels? Perhaps Penpal could appear when editing paths but change to a different panel when not? It'd also be nice to open panels with a keyboard shortcut and toggle them off when done. Maybe you can even allow scripts to add themselves to context menus?

I'd love to hear other's ideas on this but overall I think the ScriptUI problem needs to be addressed, especially since (small screen) laptops are becoming ever more common for animators now.

You used to be able to snap the anchor point to layers when using the Anchor Point tool (y) and pressing Shift or activating the snapping checkbox, now it doesn't work with the new gizmos.

Also... it's pretty useless defaulting to the same type of gizmo used for the SELECTION TOOL and not having any way to change it when you CAN'T rotate or scale an anchor point. Now you have to go to the select tool, select the POSITION gizmo and then come back to the Anchor Point tool again if you want to move an anchor point in XY space for example.

I'd like to replace the embarrassing image import code (presumably knocked together by an intern in 1998?) with something that has functional parity with the rest of the Adobe CC apps. Why should a JPG that opens without issue in Photoshop/Illustrator etc. cause After Effects to soil itself? Why can AE still not deal with CMYK bitmaps? Why does AE still not give you actual useable info on which images were not imported, rather than having to dismiss 2, sometimes 3 individual error messages for each image and then having to manually sift through what did import and try to work out what did not?
Utterly moronic. Professional software my ****.

I spend too much time hunting and pecking for which timeline elements are associated with corresponding movement in the viewport. Shifting layers, in/out points, and keyframes in time often takes multiple selection passes. And there's no way to store that selection, so they each have to be selected every time they need to be adjusted (and in/out points can't even be selected so they all need to be done separately... every time!).

Selectable in/out points and labels/groups for ALL timeline elements--any combination of keyframes, markers, in/out points, and layers--would strengthen the visual connection between the timeline and the viewport AND allow for faster timeline adjustment of those grouped movements.