After Effects 2025 – Severe preview performance issues and product stability concerns

One other question for clarification.

You say "Onset of issues: The performance problems started immediately with the release of the 2025 version at the beginning of the year. It has been unusable for us since day one."

The first release of the 2025 series — 25.0 — went live in October 2024. The release that went live at the beginning of 2025 was 25.1. 

This is an important distinction in determing where to focus our invesitgative efforts, as different changes went into each of those releases. Knowing the exact release will definitely help.

Thank you for quick response. 

Yes, we are very aware of what is being reported on community forums. The AE team is here continuously attempting to help our users.

For performance related issues like yours, the challenge is to get from the report to the actionable data we need to understand the underlying issues (and determine whether there is a single underlying problem or dozens of different ones). This is particularly compounded by the fact that we (and most users) are not experiencing this sort of behavior. That makes it all the more frustrating for us when issues like yours do arise.

Nothing really jumps out in terms of the details you've supplied so far, but the fact that you're experincing it with very light, sub-HD PNG sequences points to something very fundamental that is not working correctly.

A few of questions I should have asked initially:

1. What your experiencing is primarily an interactive performance and previewing issue and not a raw render queue rendering performance issue, correct?
2. What is the GPU configuration on these systems? Are they all identical?
3. Do you experience the same issues in the current AE Beta releases?
3. Could you create a simple AE project that demonstrates the very light, sub-HD lag, record a screen capture demonstrating the issues with that project, then make it available for me to download so I can attempt to reproduce your scenario here?

Thanks!

Paul

Hi Paul, thank you for the response. I appreciate your willingness to look into this, although I must admit the level of frustration is very high. As a 3D artist with 10 years of experience, I find it hard to see these as isolated issues, especially since they have been reported by many other users since the launch of the 2025 version.

Here are the detailed answers to your questions:

1. Installed version: We are using the latest release of After Effects 25.

2. Onset of issues: The performance problems started immediately with the release of the 2025 version at the beginning of the year. It has been unusable for us since day one.

3. Previous versions: Version 24 is acceptable. It is not perfect, as general performance seems to decline every year, but it is at least functional for professional work.

4. OS and software: The issues occur on both Windows 10 and Windows 11. These are brand new, clean systems where all Microsoft bloatware was removed at the start.

5. Drive and Cache configuration: We use M.2 NVMe drives on the latest PCIe generation. We have a dedicated M.2 drive specifically for the Disk Cache, set to the maximum possible size.

6. Display: Standard 2K display configuration. We are not using 4K for these tests.

7. Footage and Network: Usually, source footage is on an M.2 drive synced with Dropbox. However, I have tested by moving everything to local M.2 drives, and the slowdown remains exactly the same.

8. Preferences: Disk Cache and Memory & Performance are set to the maximum. Given my experience, I have tried adjusting these settings, but it does not fix the underlying lag.

9. Scenarios: This is happening 100% across the board on every machine in our office, regardless of the project or comp configuration. My entire team had to roll back to version 24 today.

10. Logging: I will generate the After Effects Log.txt file following your instructions and provide it as soon as possible.

11. Plugins: We have the Red Giant suite installed. However, I have tested the performance with very light, sub-HD PNG sequences, and the lag persists. This proves the issue is structural to the 2025 release rather than tied to specific EXR workflows or heavy plugins.

To conclude, I strongly suggest taking a look at the community forums; I have many friends in the industry and colleagues in other studios who are all experiencing the exact same issues (not on Apple hardware apparently). Do we really have to wait and hope for the 2026 version to have a working program?

Fortunately, we use DaVinci for editing, otherwise I would have to write another identical post about Premiere, which I would really like to avoid. Please excuse my frustration, Paul, but after years of waiting for truly useful updates, the least we expect is a program that performs as it should

I will upload a log file asap

Thank you for reporting this issue. It's very concerning.

What Adobe is planning to do about this right at this minute is to attempt to gather the specific information we need to start identifying what the root causes of your issue are. 

To start with, it is notable that this it is happening across all of your systems. This does tend to indicate that there may be some commonality in terms of system/AE configuration that may be resulting in these performance issues (which may very well be a bug in AE).

For starters, can you give descriptions of the specifc scenarios where you are encountering the most impactful performance issues?

Questions then:
1. Which specific versions of the AE 25 releases are installed on these systems?
2. In which specific version of the AE 25 releases did the performance issue first start?
3. Are all tested versions of the AE 24 releases "good"? 
2. Which Win OS versions are installed on these systems? What other software is installed on them (security, utility, screen capture/sharing, etc.)?
3. What are their drive configurations? In particular what is the drive configuration for the After Effects Disk Cache?
4. What is the display configuration and is Transmit being used?
5. Is source footage from network share volumes regularly used in your AE Projects? If so, what is your network share configuration (protocols, etc)?
5. What are your Preferences settings in terms of Disk Cache and Memory & Performance? Does adjusting any of these settings (e.g. Enable Disk Cache / Enable Preview) affect the performance slowdowns you are seeing?
6. Are there scenarios (Project/Comp configuration, etc.) where the slowdown is more or less likely to occur or is it 100% across the board with all configurations? Either way, could you make sample projects available for that clearly cause the slowdown scenario to occur for you?
7. Generating an After Effects Log.txt file from a session in which the performance slowdown occurrs might be very helpful for us:

Start AE
Help Menu => Enable Logging
Restart AE
Do whatever is required to get AE into the poor performance state and do a few more actions that are highly impacted by it.
Help Menu => Reveal Logging Files...
Find the "After Effects Log.txt" file and copy/paste the content back to this forum thread.

8. What 3rd party AE plugins, scripts or extensions are installed (including things like Lotte, Animation Composer, etc.)? Does removing these (if installed) have any impact on the performance issues you are experiencing?
9. You specifically call out EXR. In what manner is performance worse with EXR than with other footage types? What are the specifics of your EXR workflows? To what extent were these workflows better in whichever AE 24.0 release you are using?

This is probably enough to get us started, but there will likely be more details we will need as we begin to isolate what the problems might be.

Transparently, we are not psychics. We are not sitting around ignoring glaring obvioius issues that could be easily resolved. It really really sucks when problems like yours arise and we don't have any easy answer for you.

But we will certainly try our hardest to fiure it out.

Paul
AE Quality Engineering