Interface is Slow and Laggy

@marklowe Going to have to see this for myself. 

@Scott.C. I can confirm the same behavior like I see in your video.

I googled a little bit and I learned something. I am not a developer so please, if I write something not correct pls excuse me (same for my english).

I read an article about how operating systems deal with HIDPI interfaces. It is not physically possible that a whole UI is recalculated 60Hz or 72Hz in a second.

So the key is OPTIMALIZATION.

So in an ideal world if you touch a timeline cursor (or a keyframe) and move it, it should initiate and redrawn only really needed UI components plus the preview window. Not the whole UI AE interface.

So I decided the make a test, which solved my problem in a quite silly way, but at least I can use the paint (and clone) tool and scrub the timeline more fluently. (My problem was that I couldn't scrub the timeline fluently even with 1 UHD videotrack).

It somehow proofs the OPTIMALIZATION problem with AE UI.

I just undocked EVERY panel. I mean really EVERY. So I have separate window for project, for the FX, for the timeline, for the preview etc. So ended up with like 6 - 7 separate app windows. Guess what. Now the interface is much faster, I can finally use paint (and clone) and scrub the timeline. If I want to make a window bigger or smaller (draging the corner of the window) I feel it moves fluently. If I reverse everything back (one big window with all panels merged together) and if I try to drag a corner of the window, it feels like draging a big bag of potatos 🙂

In our posthouse we are still on AE2022 22.6 BigSur as I read AE2023 is even worse.

@Martin Matthias @jenkmeister17177426 

I can recreate that quirk as well it is very odd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wui7Hq_FD7c

Steps to create....

1. Add many layers of any type.

2. Try to scrub -- bad timeline lag. 

3. Add shape layer and a path keyframe.

4. Click on a shape path keyframe or outline

5. Try to scrub -- 50-100% improvement in scrubbing performance for no discernable reason! 

6. Click off the shape path keyframe, interface returns to very bad performance. 

I'll send you a project file Sean. 

Side note: even when all the frames are rendered on a comp like this (full green bar) scrubbing performance is still at about 2FPS I think that is also worth mentioning. It doesn't even matter if its a rendered comp if you have a lot of layers you cant scrub!

Final note: If you precomp all your many layers and use collapse transform, scrubbing and performance comes back as AE is back to one layer, (even though in my understanding AE is doing the same amount of render work)  but pre-composing is not always possible or convienient for every job, and sometimes you need to have 50+ layers open. 

@Martin Matthias I'm not aware of that one, but we will definitely try to find out what's going on. Any chance you can share that comp with us so we know we are reproducing the right issue? 

@Scott.C. this is the issue in the UI lag that I've been having. What makes it worse is a layer with a lot of key frames showing, like a null with tracking data applied to it or a roto mask from Mocha where it has a key on every frame. It's not just scrolling the time indicator, but also just scrolling up and down the layer stack with the mouse wheel has the same or worse lag.

@Marc Trzepla 

I wasn't in charge of AE's engineering in 2020 so I can only respond to what is being reported now the best we can. Our community team raising this to us along with the recent migration from User Voice to the Forums is allowing us to have better insight into the impact of issues.

We also often run into situations where we just can't reproduce what is being reported. When we can get projects that reproduce the issues quickly and easily, then we can go look at them. But often we get vague "this is slow, fix it" posts without the details we need to figure out what's going on. Right now, as I mentioned a few posts up, we do have folks actively looking at the UI, so it's good timing to also look at the reports of laggy performance. 

In terms of past bugs, we triage perhaps 30 reports a week, from all versions of AE and from things in development. Sometimes we just have to say "won't fix", sometimes it is "will fix later when we are working in this area", sometimes it's "we need to fix this now". Apologies if previous issues haven't been fixed for you, we are trying our best to keep up with 30 years of AE code and to get it modernized in as many ways as possible. It's been slow going, but hopefully you've seen updates and improvements the past couple of years that show we are turning the corner. 🤞

Curious - how did this go from (2020) “the issue that you are facing is a known issue and the same has been highlighted to the designated team who are working on getting the issue fixed in the future releases,” to (2023) “I've sent it along to one of my most senior developers for them to figure out what's going on”? That suggests this is news to the developers.

I was always confident that when I contacted Support or submitted Bug Reports issues would be officially logged and eventually fixed. Reading this thread has me concerned that issues can end up floating away into the ether.

Thank you Jenkmeister for reaching out to the community!
I'll quickly hop into the discussion to point out a strange UI behaviour that might help you finding issues.
When you select a path, the UI is being rendered much more fluid (not perfect, but acceptable). I have no clue why this could be the case, but maybe your team can figure it out. Maybe then there is a different rendering mode active that could be active all the time to improve performance? Just guessing.

Here is a video of the behaviour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIQYO0ek3U0

If you are aware of this issue, I would really be interested in knowing why it happens. I'm a software developer myself and interested in some of the details leading to this issue. 🙂

Agreed, this sounds horrible. We are debugging the test project @Scott.C. sent to me and we'll post back once we have more details. Something has definitely got awry here so we'll figure it out and get it fixed. 

Thanks for the video and for sending me the file. I can reproduce what the video shows. I've sent it along to one of my most senior developers for them to figure out what's going on. Totally agree this isn't acceptable. Will report back as soon as we have more information.