Interface slowdown when using multiple expressions

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Following up on Tim's request to post individual feature requests from Sander's site here....

http://www.sandervandijk.tv/after-effects-features/expressions#faster-interface

Expressions and coding are some of the most powerful tools AE animators have at their disposal, so the fact that using them has such a negative impact on performance is truly disappointing and counter-intuitive.

Sander:
"The interface slows down drastically when applying lots of Expressions, Code allows us to easily create complex animations and connect values. This is the highest on my list of improvements that After Effects can make."

Performance

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VictoriaNece

Community Manager

A brand new expressions engine built on modern JavaScript will ship in our next release and is up to 5x faster. You should see the biggest speed boosts with more complex expressions.

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nubnubbud

Inspiring

@Victoria Nece
...I hope you guys know that JavaScript is one of the least performant scripting languages out there, right? sure, you could do worse, but it's been not a favorite since like 2016.

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viztastic

Participating Frequently

I wonder if the issue is that expressions don't support code modularity. If we could group expressions into reusable functions that are called by different layers it might help expression developers get a performance kick?

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Chris Jeffries

Participating Frequently

Thanks for the acknowledgement, Ms. Nece.

It seems that this still needs addressing in the latest version (16.0.0 (Build 235)).

My current project is using the JavaScript Expressions Engine (indicated in the project settings panel) and the AE UI has gradually slowed to a crawl as I build out more expression-based animations.

My system is a Xeon workstation with a Quadro P4000 and separate SSDs for footage, OS, page file, and media caches.

Are there further improvements to come?

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FeedbackCommunityMemberAuthor

Inspiring

Character rigs, or other expression driven rigs become unusable and cause all kinds of interface slowdowns. You can barely change a property before the interface grinds to a hault. It feels like I'm working against the software instead of with it. It is my current nightmare and takes hours just to do something as simple as a character shaking another characters hands.

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FeedbackCommunityMemberAuthor

Inspiring

This is super important for data driven animation. I'd love a way (even if it's just a line of code) to save the output of an expression or prevent After Effects from re-executing an expression every frame.

Would dramatically speed up expressions and creating graphs, tables and other data-driven comps.

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Carlos Zenzuke Albarran

Participating Frequently

Please, I now have many projects that have maybe hundreds of expression evaluations per-frame, there are javascript engines that run extremely fast even on mobile devices. If anything, script evaluation has gotten SLOWER since CC 2014.

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FeedbackCommunityMemberAuthor

Inspiring

Very slow indeed,Even in the iMac Pro.

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FeedbackCommunityMemberAuthor

Inspiring

Even more important with the new Data-driven animation features introduced.

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