Endless Problems with After Effects

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
November 11, 2018
3 replies
624 views

I wanted to start this discussion in order to hopefully gather some thoughts and explanations as to why on earth Adobe can't seem to make a stable version of After Effects.

I've been using the Adobe Products for 10+ years now. I'm primarily a motion designer and video editor, but rely heavily on a lot of the CC products. In recent years, I've become more and more frustrated with After Effects and Adobe Premiere specifically. While I appreciate the effort by Adobe to make the products better, I often feel that they are actually making them worse.

I've used all kinds of machines Mac and PC over the years and have the same issues regardless of the machine I use. I generally produce pretty simple animations. Nothing thats too power intensive, and yet, I experience incredible slow downs, crashes, glitches, and just about every issue you can imagine having with a piece of software.

To be completely honest, I've looked for alternatives to Adobe's products because I simply can't deal with the fact that I have to spend a ridiculous amount of time troubleshooting issues or restarting AE and PR because of crashes.

While I've found good alternatives to Premiere, there isn't really any other software like After Effects, or at least it's not as good or it's more difficult to use. I feel trapped and frustrated by Adobe. I rely on AE and PR for my lively hood. Am I the only one encountering constant issues? Does anyone else feel like they spend an un reasonable amount of time troubleshooting and fixing issues? Why doesn't Adobe focus on making a stable version of AE?

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Dave_LaRonde

Inspiring

...and then, there is always the fact because you are RENTING the software, and that it has no good competitor, Adobe does not have to make sure AE works in every situation.

It doesn't have to! You are a captive to the software! Where else do you go? It's for all intents and purposes a monopoly!

Doesn't that make you feel good?

D

Dave Merchant

Legend

The rental model, and horror stories like the Dolby downgrade is precisely why the competition is getting closer to parity. A noticeable percentage of big studio Adobe users can't accept the rental system and took the decision to invest in perpetual software even if it wasn't quite good enough. The more sales these vendors got, the more development they could do. Resolve + Fusion is pretty close to Premiere + After Effects these days and is the platform of choice for many of the blockbuster movies. Photoshop and Lightroom have tough competition from the likes of Affinity and Skylum. Adobe's unique selling points, like content-aware fill, are appearing in more and more competitor products.

Adobe's business model these days is to aim low and sell volume; they'd rather have a million people subscribing to CC who never even bother to install After Effects, than a thousand people who make a career from it. Commercially it makes sense, the revenues are going up every quarter, the shareholders are dancing for joy. Making a product that people pay for every month, but never use, is about as perfect a business model as you can get.

The drawback is that if only 0.0001% of your customer base understands enough about TIFF floats to care that Photoshop's entire color engine is broken there's no hope of devoting any attention to fixing it. Creative Cloud reports back to Adobe which menus and tools you click on, so if the customers are less skilled the software becomes "apps" with massive buttons and reduced features to cater for their wishes.

D

Dave Merchant

Legend

The primary competitor to After Effects is Fusion, but they're not 1:1 equivalents and were never intended to be. Moving across is very hard, Fusion cannot read an AEP project file, and the concepts are very different (layers vs nodes), but most of the effects in AE can be recreated in Fusion if you know what you're doing.

I agree that comparatively speaking, AE has more problems in each new release than some of the other CC products (given the massive deployment base for something like Acrobat, the number of "it crashed" complaints on here are much lower than in the video applications. Even Audition seems to be better-behaved.) There are two reasons; firstly there are indeed more bugs in the released updates than there ever used to be, it's inevitable since we can't beta-test things the way we used to with annual Creative Suite editions. Secondly AE/Pr are constantly pushing for more system resources and deeper integration with things like GPU acceleration, so if a system is already hovering on the limit, these applications are far more likely to be the ones to tip it over. AE is insanely memory-hungry, with no particular reason behind it and a lot of leaks. The fact they need to add a 'purge memory' option to the menu says it all

Operating systems also aren't as reliable as they were, and now we have Windows "usefully" updating hardware drivers as and when it feels like it, getting a system to remain stable for weeks on end is not easy. When AE is trying to allocate 99% of your memory for a render job, modern Windows or OSX has a hell of a time surviving in the dregs that's left. There's increasing use of CPU overclocking in consumer kit and RAM working at its limits. None of that excuses the bugs in Adobe software, but it makes finding them a lot harder. There's no "LTS edition" of Creative.. well, anything... so if you find a version that works for a particular project, turn off updates and pray. Many studios who rely on CC don't even think of upgrading until at least one dot patch has come out.

People who say "my copy runs fine" either don't work it hard enough, or haven't yet clicked the particular combination of things that turned your timeline into a dumpster fire. Everyone gets the same code, if you have a bug on line 123456 so do they. The wonderful benefit of subscription software and the DevOps model is that you're both working for the testing department, so if y'all be so kind as to report things, someone might get round to fixing it.

And yes, Fusion crashes a lot too.

Roland Kahlenberg

Legend

I think it's also fair to state that some users have tons of other software that are installed on the system and occasionally conflicts with Adobe's DVA or some other power-hungry app, results in an 'error'. There is also the case of users (puts hand up momentarily) who run lots of other software concurrently while working with AE and/or PPro and this either exacerbates or creates issues.

Very Advanced After Effects Training | Adaptive & Responsive Toolkits | Intelligent Design Assets (IDAs) | MoGraph Design System DEV

OussK

Community Expert

Really i also work on AE in daily schedule and i don't have the issue you talking about and i'm sure there are thousand of other how's use AE and PP daily and their are OK, the only problem you can face with with adobe is the early update, so if you want to keep away from the issue, just give your self more time to update to the latest version just to be sure all bugs are fixed and you can update without issue, anyway don't think there are a magic software, with no bug and no crash for me what you will face in adobe software may will be less from what you will face in other software.

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