Feature Focus: New After Effects Spectrum UI & Windows UI Performance Improvements

As of build 28, ScriptUI panels that reference .png files should load correctly on Windows. 

Hi,

Small buttons with a single text character don't display in the beta. As you can see in the attachment, the small button just has a "?" but it's not visible in the beta UI

Following....I mentioned some things in the old "Interface is slow and laggy" thread but just wanted to post some of my tests here in case those were somehow missed....

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I get that this is early days on this re-code of the interface but was hoping for a little bit more of a FPS boost than what I'm seeing currently. 

Hoping this is cleared up with the aforementioned layer controls bug but I was getting pretty bad dropped frames even with those turned off. Video attached of my test. 

TL;DR. Still drawing keyframe icons at about 7FPS when the goal should be at least 30-60FPS.

I spent a little bit more time with the beta today and did my standard AE "tortue test" of trying to move around 50 keyframes on solids with no animations. In my opinion this should be no issue but AE struggles with moving keyframes around still and that drives me mad. I concur with Carlos that the general snapiness is much improved but once you move into heavier numbers of keyframes it still lags pretty heavily. 

Test setup.

1920x1080 24FPS comp

100 Solid Layers

Position keyframe placed all on the same frame (alt+shift+p)

Select first 50 keyframes.

Drag them about while recording with OBS. 

Count number of frames until keyframes jump to next position and determine keyframe draw FPS.

No animation should have to be recalculated and the "frame render time is at 6ms" or 166FPS. 

AE 24.2.1. (current stable) - no better than 6FPS

AE 24.4.0 (current beta) no better than 8FPS

As a comparison I selected a bunch of animation free keyframes in blender and dragged them about and it had no issue drawing the position of the keyframes on every frame. Not an apples to apples comparison obviosuly, but still think there is far too much jank in the timeline. 

The goal should be to draw the keyframes or other timeline elements (including window resizing, other aspects of the interface) at 60FPS. Even 30FPS would be game changing, currently still dealing with 6-7FPS on fairly simple edge cases. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVu0uuGvEY0

Ran the test again with layer controls off and it's marginally better but still concerning overall.

This time around trying to illustrate the performance drop when selecting more than 10 keyframes...same overall setup as before. 

In the beta (24.4.0 x20) w/ controls off I got about 25-30 FPS when selecting 10 keyframes and dragging them about (2-3 frames to update)

In the stable build (24.2.1) I got about 12-13FPS doing the same thing and the update time jumps all around from as good as 2 frames to as bad as 10 frames. So there has been a significant improvement when moving a small amount of keyframes. Not 60FPS smooth, but reasonably smooth overall. 

Again in the beta, once you jump up to 50 keyframes in the beta it takes about 6 frames to update the screen, or about 10FPS. About 2-3 FPS better than with layer controls left on but still nowhere near what I score as "smooth."

I didn't try to score 50 Keyframes in the stable build with controls off, but that is a known "laggy" interaction so didn't feel like scoring it.  

Hi there again,

I have another issue, which is not really new to the Beta version but it is regarding Script UI, so I thought this would be a good time to address it:

On Windows, when the Display Scaling is set to 100% iconbuttons and images look good. When Display Scaling is set to 125%, 150% or anyhting above 100% iconbuttons get blurry, which is understandable. But images look really jaggy. It seems that iconbuttons get anti-aliased, whereas images do not. 

Is it possible that images can get the same treatment as iconbuttons? I guess a lot of people are using 4K monitors with display scaling and it would be nice if the UI wouldn't be so jaggy. (I often use images with event listeners to build custom buttons)

On MAC when I link to an image that is double the size but scale it down to 50% so it appears to have the same size, iconbuttons and images look really nice and crisp. I thought this is a good trick for Windows as well, but they look jaggy, even when Display Scaling is set to 100%. I have attached an image showcasing this.

Is this something that can be improved?

@Brian C Carter and @Jessica McMillan 

First of all, as stated in my other comment here, congrats on the new UI. This feels much better than before, especially in terms of the speed on Windows!

However, in addition to the already mentioned issues in this thread, I have two to three problems myself with the new UI:

1. Shy'd layers aren't easily identifiable anymore

In the old UI, shy'd layers were indicated by a very visible line. However, in the new UI, the color of this line a much more like the general UI color whereas the lines between regular layers are siginificantly stronger (meaning darker). This makes it much harder to make out whether you have shy'd layers in between your regular layers. I'd like to ask you to darken the line where shy'd layers are (or to reduce the darkness between regular layers). To show you what I mean I created this image:

2. New font not as readable as the old one

I personally liked the older font more. The new font is bolder and therefore the letters are harder to read - at least that's how it is for me. I assume the new font is some type of new general UI you're going for, so it's probably unrealistic to ask of you to change this back to what it used to be but I figured I might try. 😉 Or maybe you could implement some way to select either of the fonts?

3. Super niche issue with certain Unicode blocks

Additionally, and this is admittedly a super niche aspect that's probably just affecting me and a very small portion of users but the old font allowed for a Unicode block like Halfwidth and fullwidth forms to render in a very distinct way whereas the new font renders it pretty much like any other regular letter. I made much use of the old font's behavior in my scripts in order to indicate layer statuses in clearly visible way. Unfortunately, this isn't possible with the new font anymore. Now, I know it's a super niche issue, so I'm not asking for you to change this but I at least wanted to bring it up. Maybe if there's some way to revert back to the old font (as requested in #2 to improve readability), this could also resolve this issue. Here's an image about what I'm talking about:

Thanks for all your work and I hope you consider my suggestions. 🙂

Best wishes, Constantin

i dont like the fact that i cant change the color of the theme anymore, it has to be blue... i used to always change the color but that doesnt seem to work anymore

<edited by moderator>

Please read my take on the new UI here: https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-ideas/beta-ui-changes-lose-sweet-spot-for-contrast/idi-p/14501868
I think some of the great contrast that is in the current release got lost.

Good to see the Character panel font menu displays white on black, and I can finally see the scrollbar to the right of it!

I do have some issues with the ScriptUI changes:

- The new lighter rounded buttons are maybe ok for creating oversized UI with big chunky buttons, but they don't really fit the rest of the UI and are unusable at small sizes. The text makes poor use of space (and seems misaligned vertically). The old style was usable with visible text down to a single character inside a 20x20 button. Most of my buttons are now just empty grey blobs or at best have text truncated with an ellipsis. I imagine any button that specified a size will suffer.

- At least with custom buttons you can draw text and stroke a rectangular path onto them to look exactly like the old buttons, but mine with light text are unreadable on the Light appearance. I'm not sure if ScriptUI graphics / themes give us what we need to deal with any appearance changes on custom controls? I found the ScriptUI theme/color docs kinda vague. Due to extensive use of custom buttons my current project's UI has mostly survived the button-apocalypse, but it's utterly destroyed by light mode! 🙂

- I'm seeing truncated text with ellipsis on DropDowns too. Maybe the layout manager isn't taking the chunkier controls into account?

- Small EditText controls again make poor use of internal space. 2 characters don't comfortably display inside an EditText that was specified for characters:3. Just seems unnecessarily cropped inside the control.

- Disabling a control now causes it's UI to lighten rather than blend into the background, adding visual noise to my UI. I'd rather make them invisible if it's like this.

- I like that scrollable, multiline EditText controls now have dark backgrounds too. Small point, the still bright white scrollbar stands out as being unchanged..

Hi there @Brian C Carter 

I just tried AE beta 24.4.20. finally the timeline panel lagging is almost gone, but, 3D gizmos lagging is really really really bad, as I show here.
https://youtu.be/aqfmHvd3D4Y
It's unusable! Please fix it. It's impossible to work with 3D layers. I reported the issue 2 years ago. It doesn't make sense to add 3D features if the UI doesn't work. I'm on Ryzen 2700x, 32GB ram, Rtx 4070 super.
Cheers

Hi,

those are some really nice changes but I tried out several scripts - my own included - and all the scripts, that use images don't run at all on my Windows machine.

The script UI doesn't show up and I get the following error message in an infinite loop (I have to force quit AE):

"After Effects (Beta) error: Unexpected data type".

Her are my specs:

Application: After Effects (Beta) v24.4.0.20

OS: Windows v10.0.22631, RAM: 127,80 GB GB, CPUs (logical): 20, GeForce RTX 4080

On my Macbook Air M1 it works however.  (OS: Sonoma 14.2.1)

Anyone else having these problems on Windows?