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Madeline5DD4
Participant
Apr 2, 2021 3:37 AM UTC
Question

After Effects really slow with SF Pro Font

Hello all, 

 

After Effects 2021 (18.0.1) has a real hard time processing the Mac standard SF Pro font on my Windows device. I installed it like any other font (unpackaged the OTF from the Apple website) and it works fine in all other programs, but for some reason After Effects doesn't like it? The 3-minute animation (motion blur, 20+ layers, with camera video) can render within 4 minutes, but when I put the lower thirds in render time skyrockets to almost 2 hours. 

It took me a while to figure out that it was the specific font, but I tested it with other windows & Adobe native fonts, and render time was fixed. 

Not sure if anyone has experienced this, or found a solution, but any help would be great! Normally, I would pick another font but brand requirements and whatnot.

Comp: 
Ryzen 1700x
32gb ram
1080ti

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    56 replies

    Bevan Bell -Cisco
    Bevan Bell -Cisco
    Participating Frequently
    Aug 3, 2023 10:00 PM UTC

    I'm currently dealing with fonts crippling AE (inter, arial, sharp sans) and it just started yesterday.  I'm not sure what's going on but my only work around has been to turn the fonts off while working.  This is August 2023 

    M1 Macbook pro

    Ventura 13.5
    64G Ram (using 4%) 

    AE version 23.5.0

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      nishu_kush
      nishu_kush
      Legend
      Aug 16, 2023 7:26 PM UTC

      Hi Bevan Bell -Cisco,

       

      Sorry to hear that.

      Are these external fonts or were they included with the OS installation? Could you elaborate more on crippling? If possible, share a screen recording that shows the issue.

      Looking forward to your response.

       

      Thanks,

      Nishu

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      Bevan Bell -Cisco
      Bevan Bell -Cisco
      Participating Frequently
      Aug 18, 2023 12:09 AM UTC

      Here's a link to a screen capture.  The text I'm using is Inter.  Whenever I inroduce a text layer AE becomes very slow to respond near the point of unuseable.  
      It doesn't seem to change if I try to change the font.  I thought if I used the text within it's own comp, that might help but the problem persists.  Doesn't seem to be a RAM problem, but it does seem to be struggling like it were a RAM issue. 
      https://vimeo.com/855538691/0db0177b4e?share=copy

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      defaultht4l7gykurg2
      Participant
      Apr 25, 2023 6:57 PM UTC

      I have the same problem with the "Inter" font family on my Mac laptop. I'm on the latest OS with Ventura. Whenever I select Inter as a font family to animate with in After Effects, it slows RIGHT DOWN, and it's affecting my workflow. Any thoughts or suggestions on what I can do to help fix this?

      Thanks in advance

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      Budd Tugley
      Inspiring
      Apr 26, 2023 2:41 PM UTC
      My advice is to use a different font manager. FontBook comes with your Mac
      and is not a professional-level tool. I switched to a different font
      manager and my AE problems with SF Pro went away. Maybe could work with
      "Inter"?
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      pmse
      pmse
      Participating Frequently
      Jun 17, 2022 3:07 AM UTC

      copy that, I'm working on an apple project and they gave me that fon. I was first like what the heck why is my AE project so slow all of a sudden? Talked to other animators working on the same project and everyone had the same porblem.  I'm calling it the font from hell. 

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      Adobe Employee
      Douglas_Waterfall
      Adobe Employee
      May 26, 2022 7:18 PM UTC

      We recently integrated some improvments which target fonts like these - if you are able, please try our Beta 22.5.0 (Build 36) currently available on CC and please share your experience.

       

      SF Pro Compact Display is what I have tested with and it is 3x faster now, but still 3x slower than say Arial. In my opinion it takes it from being impossible to being just sluggish.

       

      Douglas Waterfall

      After Effects Engineering

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      adobec36529142
      adobec36529142
      Participant
      Jun 10, 2022 12:26 AM UTC

      Still have a serious issue with this SF Pro font, I can't even have it display properly in After Effects anymore, but it is a font we have to use all the time to mock any Mac / iPhone screens.  Now I have to try to make everything in illustrator or Photoshop and avoid live text in AE... Wasted a long time no to mention the number of limitations I am facing for not being able to animate them in AE as text.  Fixes or workaround soon will be apperciated.

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      Adobe Employee
      Douglas_Waterfall
      Adobe Employee
      Jun 10, 2022 4:54 AM UTC

      Other than the slowness of the handling of this font (and some of the other SF Pro fonts), the only other issue I am aware specific to SF Pro in particular is the incorrect display of the regular (normal?) face for all styles other than regular - it is covered in this forum post.

       

      Is this the behavior that you are referring to? If yes, then we know about this and are trying to work out the right fix for a number of Adobe products, not just After Effects. Some proposed solutions fix After Effects but break another apps. It is being actively considered.

       

      If you are seeing different behavior than described above, we would very much like to learn more about what you are seeing so we can understand it.

       

      Douglas Waterfall

      After Effects Engineering

       

       

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      mostafa_bepari
      mostafa_bepari
      Participant
      Apr 6, 2022 5:32 PM UTC

      I've suffered so much because of this issue. I deeply feel for all the creative professionals out there. Just wanted to say, this solved my issue, and AE/PS is no longer lagging for me. I hope this solves your issue as well.

       

      Download from here: https://github.com/tylerwolf35/AppleFonts

      Font Version: 15.0d5e5

       

      Thank you Tyler Wolf.

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        adobec36529142
        adobec36529142
        Participant
        Jun 10, 2022 12:37 AM UTC

        Thank you!!!!

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        michalt11569293
        Participant
        Apr 6, 2022 1:57 PM UTC

        Yup, same here! As soon as I put a tiny text in the SF font my AE project freaked out and the Unknown exception prompt came on etc. Deleted the text and hey presto! M

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        defaultsigv4c71h3l6
        Participant
        Mar 29, 2022 1:24 AM UTC

        So SFPro version 17.1 that released last year bumped the size of the font family 10x from 300KB to 3MB EACH. Was running into this issue and bumped down to SFPro version 13 and everything ran perfectly.

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        Budd Tugley
        Inspiring
        Mar 29, 2022 1:49 PM UTC

        Thanks! That's a good workaround.

        I also found that by using a third party font manager app like Font Explorer or RightFont instead of FontBook I was able to work with the newer version of SF Pro just fine. FontBook comes pre-installed on all Apple computers and I've always found it to be a lacking. Now I have another reason to leave it behind.

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        pkon123
        Participant
        Feb 15, 2022 12:51 AM UTC

        Had the same issue, was driving me crazy. Mac user here but my After Effects file using SF Pro made it extremely slow and unusable. I had a new computer, downloaded the fonts from the original source https://developer.apple.com/fonts/ and this is what screwed everything up. Ended up taking SF Pro font files from my old machine and everything worked perfectly! So bizarre, thanks all who posted here for all the tips.

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        Anthony230475555stp
        Participant
        Feb 21, 2022 10:37 AM UTC

        I thought I was going crazy! restarting AE, restarting my Mac! I removed the SF Text layer and it works perfectly again. I can confirm this is still a problem in AE 22.2.0 (Build 120) with SF Pro, SF Pro text, SF Pro Display.

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        nishu_kush
        nishu_kush
        Legend
        Feb 21, 2022 11:47 AM UTC

        Thanks for sharing your finding, Anthony.

        Engineers are working on fixing it. Keep an eye on the updates.

         

        Thanks,

        Nishu

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          Concept-Production
          Concept-Production
          Inspiring
          Dec 24, 2021 11:48 AM UTC

          Hello everybody, 

          I really have the same issue, any solution so far ? 

          I spend three days working on a project that cool takes only one hour, only just because of this font's issue. The only solution I know so far is to replace the missing font one by one in others to have the AFX working smoothly again. 

           

          Let say if you have 2000 Layes with missing font in different comp, this is not going to be solved manually. All the giving solution in this discussion did not solve the issue. I just spend another day out trying those solutions with fails.

          I am using AFX 2022.

           

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          Erns R.
          Dr Ken R Lunde
          Dr Ken R Lunde
          Participating Frequently
          Dec 7, 2021 1:47 AM UTC

          While I cannot comment on the workaround stated above, because I am unfamiliar with Right Font, I can reveal the results of testing my theory about the particular font attribute that is triggering the exceptionally slow performance in Adobe After Effects.

          My theory, which has been confirmed through testing, is that the ratio of characters to glyphs is triggering the exceptionally slow performance. The further that the character to glyph ratio deviates from 1:1, in favor of glyphs, the slower the performance.

          The following are the numbers of characters and glyphs in the public-facing SF Pro Version 17.0d12e1 fonts: 5,727 characters and 18,876 glyphs. The SF Symbols repertoire includes small and larger versions of the characters that are accessed via OpenType stylistic set features, and are therefore not directly encoded. The number of encoded SF Symbols in the Version 17.0d12e1 fonts is 3,942, meaning that the number of associated glyphs is three times that figure. The exact ratio of characters to glyphs is 1:3.3, which is quite far from 1:1. To test my theory, I copied the mappings for the 3,942 SF Symbols in Plane 16 to Planes 13 and 15, which resulted in fonts with 13,611 characters and the same figure of 18,876 glyphs. The ratio of characters to glyphs dropped to 1:1.39, and the performance issues went away.

          I am not sure how closely Adobe is monitoring this thread, but I will be conveying these results to Adobe in the coming days, in hope that the Adobe After Effects team can address this performance issue.

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          Budd Tugley
          Inspiring
          Dec 7, 2021 10:32 PM UTC

          That's a LOT of glyphs. I'm sure that affects performance. I don't want to discount Dr. Ken's hypothesis because I think the large number of glyphs in SF Pro is definitely cumbersome and I would like to know Adobe's thoughts on this bug.

          My experience is that Apple's Font Book, which has always been lacking in brain capacity, is also a culprit. 

          To be clear, I am not recommending Right Font. I needed a free fast option from the App Store to test on my work machine. Right Font fit the bill.  After removing SF Pro from Apple's Font Book and adding to Right Font, I was able to work with SF Pro in After Effects without losing my mind. 

           

          My preferred font manager is FontExplorer, which I own for my personal use and highly recommend. I tested some of the same AE files on my personal machine, where I have Font Explorer X installed as my font manager. I had no issues with SF Pro.


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