Severe Interface Lag and Spinning Cursor in After Effects on macOS

Forum|Forum|8 months ago
November 11, 2025
1 reply
83 views

Whenever I interact with any part of After Effects—such as opening the Window menu, stopping the preview, starting the preview, selecting a composition, clicking a layer, or even deselecting one—the application briefly freezes, and my Mac cursor changes to the spinning loading (wait) indicator before responding. This delay occurs consistently with nearly every click or action, making the interface feel unresponsive and sluggish.

Additionally, I have a third-party plug-in, FX Console, and whenever I use my assigned shortcut keys to open its search bar, After Effects freezes momentarily, shows the loading cursor, and then nothing appears—the FX Console panel fails to open altogether.

Issue.zip

nishu_kush

Legend

Sorry to hear about the issue.

Could you let us know your system specifications (CPU, GPU, RAM, OS version) and the version of After Effects you're using? Is it happening in a specific project or in all of them? Can you try running After Effects in Safe Mode with third-party plug-ins disabled?

Let me know. Moving this thread from Bugs to Discussions for troubleshooting.

Thanks,
Nishu

A

andreharrell95

Participant

I am having the same exact issue. Spinning wheel every single click. I completely uninstalled and deleted everything adobe. Every app, Creative Cloud, every stray folder in Application Support, Caches, and hidden folders, AND ran the Creative Cloud clean utility app. Re-installed everything from scratch and the same issues persist. This is new as of the last 2 weeks. No OS changes have happened. I have the same issues with Premiere. Both started having issues at the same time. After effects runs fine in safe mode, but after the re-install I don’t have any 3rd party applications in use at all. What is the issue?

Apple MacBook Pro M3 Max 16-Core, 128GB Ram

Sequoia 15.7.3

Nishu Kushwaha

Community Manager

Thanks for reaching out.

Since Safe Mode works cleanly and you have no third-party plugins, the issue is likely in your user Library Adobe folders. Since Premiere is affected too, it's a shared Adobe component causing this.

Try a deeper clean:

1. Quit all Adobe apps.
2. In Finder, hold Option + click Go menu > Library.
3. Delete or move to Desktop these folders:
- ~/Library/Preferences/Adobe/
- ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/
- ~/Library/Caches/Adobe/
- ~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.*
4. Restart the Mac.
5. Reinstall Adobe apps from Creative Cloud.

You can clear the shared plug-in storage if the steps above don’t help:

Go to the following location and remove (or move to a different location to keep a backup) all the files and folders except dummy.txt and try to launch After Effects.

Location - HD/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Plugins/7.0/MediaCore

Let me know how it goes.

Thanks,

Nishu

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