Inspiring

Interface is Slow and Laggy

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
September 28, 2022
312 replies
33461 views

Dear Adobe,

Me again.

Please stop everything that you're doing with the development of new bells and whistles and doodads and put all your resources and firepower into resolving the years-old issue of the Slow and Laggy Interface in After Effects. Seriously. It's been YEARS. I kept thinking, "ah, they'll fix it soon.." and hope for the best and I end up feeling like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football every time a new update for After Effects comes out. "Maybe they fixed it!" And it's still not fixed.

When I contact Support I'm told, "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," but it has yet to be fixed.

Old After Effects was FASTER on OLDER laptops - I have been on modern workstation-build DESKTOPS that are slower in response. Makes me not want to work in After Effects. I feel bad for those starting out in motion graphics in 2020 and this is what they are introduced to.

SpaceX put two astronauts on the space station. Surely we can get a butter smooth interface in After Effects.

Thank you.

https://vimeo.com/441661685/b7aba12cba

Performance

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J

jenkmeister17177426

Jenkmeister

@Marc Trzepla That's a new one. I can't say I've seen the UI delay like that. Is this with all projects, some projects, got anything more you can share with us?

Bassefrans

Inspiring

I could be out in the sun with my friends and enjoy my summer vacation, but here I am, PAST a deadline because this god awful bug ridden piece of junk of a software keeps lagging, freezing and crashing, not to mention that idiotic in your face autosave abrupting me in the middle of my flow all the time so I have to sit there and WAIT for it to finish... WHY?! I sit there and think of how After Effects have taken away the joy of working with graphic design and animation for me. I really mean this. I will never, NEVER, EVER touch AE or any of the other Adobe programs once I finish this project. I just want to scream out loud in frustration and despair.
Oh wait...
I do.
Every day.

M

Marc TrzeplaAuthor

Inspiring

@jenkmeister1961936

OP here. I’m a big fan of clues. (puts on deerstalker cap)

Here’s a screen capture of me in the most recent non-beta version of After Effects noticing how toggling SOLO status is part of Laggy World™. Shy, however, is ROCKET fast. Hmmm, I wonder. Why...

My “I’m not a developer, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn last night” gut says the Solo behavior is 100% ‘interface’ related and NOT ‘render’ related - I’ve always had the impression that solo’ing a selection of layers will only refresh the comp viewer ONCE, NOT one at a time for every single layer, so the delay is not ‘how long it takes to composite the layers in the viewer.’ It’s not, “Step 1) Select All, Step 2) Click one of the Solo buttons, 3) Solo Layer 1 and render, 4) Solo Layer 2 and render 5) Solo Layer 3 and render, etc.. In this sequence I do not watch the comp viewer pop-pop-pop the visibility of layers in progression. So this delay we see in this screen capture? Interface redraw.

Solo button switching is interface, Shy toggling is interface, but they behave completely differently, like night and day. So now the question is, what’s the difference in the code that toggles SHY versus SOLO? Which leads us to, could the code that draws SHY inform the fix for the overall Laggy Interface?

vimeo.com/manage/videos/841378936

J

jenkmeister17177426

Jenkmeister

@Scott.C. Nothing too much to share out at this time. There is work on-going but I can't commit to any time frame. As we complete pieces and we are happy with those working well, we will push things to Beta. Timeline performance is still being looked at; we are down in the bowels of graphic drawing routines trying to understand the perf and threading issues to identify the right fixes. We'll post back here as we release fixes though.

S

Scott.C.

Inspiring

@jenkmeister17177426

Any updates on the interface project? I get you said it will take "awhile" but I think it would go a long way for me and others if you actually pushed some of this work into the beta? Is there an alpha build of it at least? I will grant that scrubbing the playhead on Windows is much improved, so kudos there, but basic things like selecting many keyframes and moving them is still a slideshow after nearly 6 months. I can replicate the OPs behavior on just a stack of solids with position keyframes readily. Thats some slow progress after five years Can Adobe hire an engineer to write this code? I'd pay an extra dollar a month just not to be presented with this every day. I've said it before but I could care less about (sorry to say) half-baked 3D features into AE if the interface still runs at 3fps. If you can't move a 3D gizmo at more than 12fps no one is going to want to use the 3D features as a serious tool when Blender exists for free.

PanBeep

Known Participant

Dear ADOBE, how many times do we have to ask you fixed this software?

nubnubbud

Inspiring

slow drawing code should be little to no issue- opengl and opencl both run extremely fast when drawing splines, even in something as slow as python. AE should be in C or C++ or something similar. if you guys need help drawing a few pixels at almost no resource usage, you might want to look at Blender's code. it's freely available and easy to browse. best of all, it works in both C and C++, with python API for examples on exposing and allowing extension from external scripts.

R

Rob217717683hsl

Inspiring

@jenkmeister17177426 No worries. I've disabled this and will monitor performance.

I'm on MacOS FYI.

J

jenkmeister17177426

Jenkmeister

@Rob217717683hsl Thank you for the video and the project. This lag is caused by the layer overlays being enabled and admittedly, some very slow drawing code on Windows when those overlays are outside the bounds of the composition. If you turn off the layer overlays (View -> Hide Layer Controls) then you'll see some performance improvements. This is on our backlog to fix in a future update to AE.