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Chad37837382m6om
Participant
March 25, 2026
Question

Why are my macOS studio computers After Effects unintentionally deploying (or falling back to) the Torq/NAPI JS engine instead of Adobe’s standard expression engine.

  • March 25, 2026
  • 4 replies
  • 59 views

Hello Adobe AE Team,

I am experiencing a reproducible issue across four identical Mac Studio units (Apple M3 Ultra, 256 GB RAM) running macOS Sequoia 15.5, where After Effects is loading the Torq/NAPI JavaScript engine instead of the Adobe JavaScript engine.

Across AE versions 25.4, 25.5, and 26.0, the following diagnostic expressions always return:

$.engineName → "torq/napi"
typeof(TextDocument) → "undefined"

This indicates that AE is not loading the expected Adobe JS engine and instead is loading a fallback runtime that does not support TextDocument APIs.

As a result, all of the following APIs fail:

  • new TextDocument()
  • .style
  • .fontSize
  • .leading
  • .setFontSize()
  • .setLeading()
  • .setJustification()

I have thoroughly eliminated all environmental causes:

✅ Confirmed no Torq, Fusion, NAPI, or Resolve frameworks in system paths
✅ Confirmed no PATH or DYLD overrides
✅ Confirmed no per-user shell modifications
✅ Confirmed no MDM restrictions
✅ Confirmed Full Disk Access for AE and Terminal
✅ Confirmed quarantine flags cleared
✅ Confirmed new clean macOS user profiles
✅ Confirmed fresh prefs reset
✅ Confirmed reinstalls of all tested AE versions
✅ Confirmed the behavior is identical on all systems

Given that:

  • every AE version tested (25.4, 25.5, 26) loads "torq/napi",
  • all systems are clean and identical, and
  • TextDocument is missing across the board,

this strongly suggests that current macOS After Effects builds are unintentionally deploying (or falling back to) the Torq/NAPI JS engine instead of Adobe’s standard expression engine.

My team needs confirmation of this issue and guidance on:

  1. Whether this engine is expected in these builds
  2. Whether a patch or update is planned
  3. Whether there is a way to force AE to load the correct Adobe JS engine
  4. A temporary workaround for restoring TextDocument functionality

Our workflow depends heavily on TextDocument-based rigs, so this is a production blocker.

Thank you,  -Chad

    4 replies

    JohnColombo17100380
    Community Manager
    JohnColombo17100380Community Manager
    Community Manager
    June 8, 2026

    Hi ​@davidb46026235,

    Thank you for clarifying, I’m glad the methods for text styling are working now. Regarding the performance issues, are you able to share a project with us that shows the lag?

     

    Thanks again,

    - John, After Effects Engineering Team  

    D
    davidb46026235
    Inspiring
    June 5, 2026

    Thanks so much Amir and Kevin, a quick followup: I am seeing the engine reported as torq/napi while on the JavaScript engine.  (After changing to the Legacy ExtendScript engine, $.engineName returns nothing when applied as an expression on sourceText in a text layer. ) We actually are getting TextDocument functionality it seems, but projects become extremely, unusably slow when there are more than a few text layers with any expressions present on the SourceText property.  This seems to be particularly true when text layers contain expressions that use text style function calls, but is even the case if enough layers are present that have a simple expression such as setting sourceText to a string literal via an expression.  The behavior I experience is that operations like moving layers around in the timeline, or even positioning the Current Time Indicator have unusable lag.  This seems to only be true if the Composition window is open.  If I maximize the Timeline with the ~ key, the UI responds normally. But once the Composition window is visible, the interface lag again becomes extreme.  If I drop the expression engine to Legacy ExtendScript, I no longer experience the UI lag (but this is not an option, because Legacy ExtendScript is missing features I need).  Again, to be clear, this extreme UI lag seems to occur under the JavaScript engine (currently reported as torq/api) even if the expressions are simple and do not make calls to the TextDocument or to set the style.  This behavior is happening in AE 26.0.0 on Mac OS 26.5 on M5 Max Macbook Pro.

    A
    Community Manager
    Amir StoneCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    June 3, 2026

    Hi Chad,

    Can you please check your project settings to see what expression engine is selected?

    Unless you manually select it, the legacy expression engine is not the default for new projects anymore.
     

    Amir (AE Engineering)

     

    D
    davidb46026235
    Inspiring
    May 29, 2026

    We are having this same issue and indeed it is a major problem.  Does adobe staff monitor this forum area, or does this need to be posted elsewhere to get noticed and fixed by adobe?

    K
    Community Manager
    Kevin-MonahanCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    June 2, 2026

    Thanks for the detailed report, ​@Chad37837382m6om.
    ​@davidb46026235 - thanks for verifying the issue.

    I'll make sure the After Effects team is aware of this thread right away so they can take a look at your findings and provide guidance.

    I appreciate the time you've spent investigating and documenting the issue.

     

    Thanks.
    Kevin

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