Why is After Effects v 26.0.0 dramatically slowing down all preview and export rendering?

​@nishu_kush : I am still forced to keep working in After Effects v. 25 because the AE26 problem discussed in this thread has never been fixed by Adobe. I am running out of patience after 8 months. In my case, importing a simple, single MXF file and one audio track and putting them together in a timeline causes an enormous slowdown when I try to render like 20 seconds. I see the tiny green bar in the timeline looking two seconds ahead and then it stops. It simply STOPS rendering and then I have to wait for ten minutes or so for AE to crawl another two seconds ahead, it's crazy. Sometimes this green bar doesn't even start advancing, as if AE is waiting for something. Now this was not the case in AE25. I could drop in an MXF and press the spacebar and it would run realtime.

Note: the ‘enable compressed cache frames’ is switched OFF, so there is no solution.

The last thing I heard from you was that you were able to recreate the problem. So, what happened in the last 8 months, what was the conclusion? I hope very much to hear from you.

Best regards, Tom

Any fix for this yet? Still experiencing it in Sep 2026. Fixes mentioned in the thread haven’t worked for me.

Hey, so, I don’t know how to say this. Why do they have to make a thing this much buggy? My client is so pissed off at me. It used to take very low time to render no metter what I am working on. Just imported a bunch of png from a render of UE5 project. It’s taking forever to render it. 

I use mac mini m4, to render 3000+ frames it took me 1.2 Hour only in UE 5.8.1. But, the fun fact is a soft like AE is taking more literally 30minutes to render 2000+ frames of it. This is pissing me off. It used to be so fast at this. Just after changing the version it’s cooking me. 

Yep, same problem. Even worse in the latest update. Something like changing the font on a text layer can take 5-10 seconds to update on screen.  I’m using a MacBook Pro M4 Max with 128 gb RAM, I look forward to Adobe claiming me this is somehow the fault of the hardware as they always do. 

Hi Everyone,

After months of waiting for a response, update or solution the new version of AE, 26.2.1 is out. I haven't experienced the same amount of trouble yet, so something must have been changed. Heard nothing about a fix, cause of the problem, follow-up, whatsoever. But the problem seems to be gone.

Bonjour, j’ai exactement le même problème décrit par Lewiz…quelle perte de temps. Les abonnements CC c’est vraiment du vol qualifié !!!

Hi all,

We need your system specifications (CPU, GPU, RAM, OS version) details in order to investigate the issue further.

Looking forward to your response.

Thanks,

Nishu

I have the same experience with 25vs24 and 26vs24. AE24 renderes (hires bitmaps) ten times faster than AE25 and AE26. I often have to prerender some scenes in AE 24 if I am in hurry..

I was working on a project that was slow but managable. Then i upgraded to v26.0. It was EXTREMELY slow. Borderline unusable.
I almost spend money on getting a new SSD cause I legit thought it was a hardware issue (after all the fixes I tried). Especially since I just had a new PSU upgrade since my old one started to fail.

I switched back to v25.x and the speed was back to what I was expecting.

thanks adobe for making me install 2 versions of your software. I have other projects I already worked on using 26.0 and with Dynamic Links to Premier 26.0, so i cant just switch back to 25.x for both software..