In After Effects, the Effects panel randomly becomes unresponsive. The app doesn’t crash, but I can’t select any effects. It worked minutes ago. Sometimes it fixes itself, sometimes I must restart AE.

Forum|Forum|1 month ago
February 17, 2026
3 replies
88 views

_Ae_ui_effects

ShiveringCactus

Community Expert

I’ve seen this with Video Copilot Element and I managed to work out that the GPU was “sort of … soft crashing”(?). It also occurred a little with Windows 11 in general. If you go into Preferences … Display and choose Disable video hardware encoding / decoding then you might see the issue disappear.

I think what was happening in my case was the the same bit of the graphics processor that AE was using was being used by either Element or Windows and they froze up AE.

harlee.7

Participant

Hi I am also having this problem, have been since December. I can’t seem to find that in the preferences anywhere am I missing something?

nishu_kush

Legend

The layout of the preferences has been changed in this version. I think @ShiveringCactus is talking about disabling “Hardware Accelerate Composition, Layer, and Footage panels” which is now under the Appearance tab in the Preferences.

Let me know if that helps.

Thanks,

Nishu

nishu_kush

Legend

Hi smyplt,

Sorry to hear about the issue. What are your system specifications (CPU, GPU, RAM, OS version) and version of After Effects? Can you try running After Effects in Safe Mode with third-party plug-ins disabled?

Let me know if it works better in Safe Mode.

Thanks,

Nishu