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iSec_1234
iSec_1234
Participant
April 16, 2026

Some third-party plug-ins show garbled non-English UI text in After Effects 26.2

  • April 16, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 68 views

After updating to After Effects 26.2, I noticed that some third-party plug-ins are showing garbled text in their UI controls.

In my case, I can clearly reproduce this with plug-ins that include Chinese text, and I suspect it may also affect other non-English or non-Latin languages as well.

What made me pay attention to this is the 26.2 release note saying:
“Effect names are now correctly encoded for Unicode characters when accessed by third-party plug-ins.”

So I’m wondering if this may be related.

One detail that seems important: if I open project files that already use these third-party effects in Safe Mode (without loading third-party plug-ins), the Chinese parameter names display correctly. But in normal mode, some of those same labels appear garbled.

I’m not the plug-in developer, just an end user reporting what I observed in testing, so I can’t tell whether this is an AE issue, a plug-in compatibility issue, or an interaction between both. But the behavior seems to have changed after updating to 26.2.

If needed, I can provide screenshots or a screen recording.

      1 reply

      AdoreLowen1
      AdoreLowen1
      Participant
      April 17, 2026

      I have been testing this too, and it looks like AE 26.2 now strictly enforces UTF-8 for third-party plugin APIs. However, many plugins or localized versions still output strings using legacy system locales, like ANSI or GBK. This encoding mismatch causes the garbled text. In Safe Mode, AE may just read the cached, correctly encoded Unicode data saved in the project file, without querying the actual plugin API.

      Interestingly, if you are on Windows, turning on "Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support" in the region settings actually fixes the issue for official plugins like Red Giant. This is because these plugins dynamically use system APIs for text, so forcing the OS to UTF-8 aligns them with AE's new requirement.

      Unfortunately, this Windows fix does not work for community-made translation patches. Those patches often use hex editors to hardcode localized bytes over the original English ASCII. Since they do not use dynamic system APIs, AE 26.2 forcefully reads those legacy bytes as UTF-8, breaking them completely.

      While the shift to Unicode is good long-term, it breaks a lot of legacy tools. Hopefully, the After Effects team can add a legacy encoding fallback option in a future update.

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