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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

Participant
Aug 12, 2021 2:43 PM UTC

I'm having this same exact problem. How you guys made it work? Just changing the font to some similar like helvetica?  

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Participant
Aug 12, 2021 2:44 PM UTC

I made a 2 layer + 2 text comp (using SF family) and it's already unusable (on a 2019 MBP 15").

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Participant
Aug 4, 2021 5:15 PM UTC

Wow, I'm glad i'm not the only one. The moment I added this font as live text my performance tanked. I'm on an iMac 4.2GhZ i7, 32GB ram, Radeon Pro 580 8GB gpu. I'm looking at 1h+ render time for 4 seconds of animation.

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KingOfTheHacks
Participant
Jun 28, 2021 8:32 PM UTC

Same issue - on an extremely tight turn project (of course) where I'm animating product interactions. The only workaround I can think of is to set all the type ahead of time in Illustrator or some such.

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Participant
Jul 27, 2021 5:45 AM UTC

This is also a problem on my 2019 Mac Pro with Big Sur 11.4 so not just a PC issue.

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Participant
Jun 18, 2021 9:16 AM UTC

I have the same issue! Please help 😞

 

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Participant
May 14, 2021 10:10 AM UTC

I'm also having this issue and I couldn't find a workaround. I downloaded the fonts from Apple but they make my AE run painfully slow. Has anyone found a solution? 

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Participating Frequently
Apr 16, 2021 5:49 AM UTC

Having the same issue here - the moment I changed to the SF font, AE is barely responsive at all. I've yet to try converting the fonts to TTF's or something else. Will give that a shot.

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Participating Frequently
Apr 16, 2021 5:59 AM UTC

Just tested other OTF vs TTF fonts on my computer and none of them cause any performance issues. The only one that does it is the SF family... I'm stumped.

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