Version 25.3.2 EXR handling fell of a cliff

I also have absolutely massive issues with After Effects and EXR handling this past few months. It has become almost impossible to get a bug-free export on my latest projects. So much so that I've had to convert all my EXRs to ProRes using non-Adobe software, before compositing in AE. 

EXRs will randomly mess up frames in a sequence. If you reload footage, a different set of frames are now messed up. This also depends on where the playhead is when hitting reload. Portions of the frames are missing in AE, while fine in other software.

Turning on Mercury GPU acceleration with CUDA will result in clipped highlights on random frames (at least when using OCIO and ACEScg). An issue I've seen mentioned on these forums years ago.

Hi, I just wanted to mention that I have more or less the same issue. In partricular on two workstation (one threadripper 3970x + 3070nvidia and one ryzen 3950x  +  2070super nvidia) I loaded several exr sequnces and it randomly shows glithces. I reload the sequences and the glitch changes. I purge everything (ram and cache), reload, it gets solved, but the glitch appears somewhere else.

Following up here again:

1. Further testing on my side is not showing any EXR performance regressions on Win across the 25.2.x or 25.3.x releases. This included testing with both EXtractoR and Cyrptomatte.
2. To date, we haven't received any other reports of this slowdown (across thousands of EXR imports/exports from 25.2/25/3), so it's not looking like a more generalized regression. 

To proceed, we really need to get some more details about your EXR files, how they are being set up in your AE projects, and then how they are being rendered out.

Is it only EXR footage that is showing this extreme slowdown on your systems?
Do you see the same slowdown just with basic EXR I/O (no Cryptomatte or EXtractoR) involved?
Have you tried importing/exporting the EXRs to/from different drives or a local network volumes?
Have you recently changed any security or other software/configuration settings on your systems that might be affecting read/write performance?

Really just trying to get any details here that could help us to resolve the problem.

Something really unexpected happened here if this performance regression was introduced in 25.3.2 (and is not in 25.3.1). The only thing changed in that release was a fix for PDF/AI error handling. 

And to confirm your observations, I do not expect this to be hardware related at all — particularly since you are not reading the EXRs across the network or through some MAM. 

I completely understand you cannot share any NDA footage, but if it would at all be possible for someone in your pipeline to generate a couple of test EXRs which also reproduce this problem for us, it would really expedite our analysis of this.

In the meantime, if you were not seeing this issue in 25.3.1, it is very easy to roll back to that version via Creative Cloud for now.

Hey Kevin

No other major changes. I updated to the latest nVidia Studio Driver 577.00 2 days ago, but the EXR performance issues were already there before the driver update. No noticable change after updating on either system. 

No other changes on either system. 

I wanted to highlight the fact that the performance nose dive happened on both desktops, even though the hardware is wildy different. AMD vs Intel. EVGA vs Asus GPUs. Samsung vs WD SSDs, GSkill vs Corsair RAM etc. The only constant is the AE updates on both that wrecked performance. 

Hey Paul

The slow-down only started happening in the last week. So I'm guessing this latest updates (25.3.xxx) is what caused it. 2+ weeks ago, everything was fine.

I will try tonight after work, to see if I can be more specific about which exact version caused the slow down. 

Unfortunately I cannot provide you with the EXRs as we are under NDA with this project. 

Hi Jessica
Thank you for the reply. Whatever changesd were made to EXRs absolutely destroyed productivity. Renders that took 1.5mins, now take 25+ minutes...
I don't really want to mess with Beta versions as we are mid project and if something goes wrong...
Do you know whether the new Beta addresses EXR performance specifically? Or if not, do you know which upcoming version will?

Hello @Hein_S,

Thanks for reaching out and for the detailed breakdown of your setup and workflow—it's clear you've put a lot of thought into optimizing your systems, and I can imagine how frustrating this recent EXR slowdown must be.

The 25.3.2 release included changes to the EXR plugin, and while some improvements were intended, there have been some reports of slowdowns with EXR.

Have you had a chance to try the latest After Effects Beta? The Beta builds following 25.3.2 included additional updates to the openEXR plugin specifically around performance.

Thanks again for your patience and taking the time to report this issue. Let us know how it goes or if you'd like help testing the beta setup.