After Effects

I’m using an M1 Macbook Pro and have updated to After Effects 26.5.0Whenever I bring in an MXF file it either won’t play, or takes a few minutes to generate a few seconds of a preview. I’ve experienced this across the three Macs we use at my work. We’ve reverted to 2025 where the issue isn’t happening.We use a daily ‘master project’ that we duplicate every morning and use for that days work (for work on a daily tv show). If I create a brand new blank project and import an MXF it’ll play it fine, but as soon as I import the original project, it slows again. If I save the project in 26 as a 25 project and open it in 25 there are no issues.

Does anyone know how to fix my After Effects 2024? I try loading it up, and it starts loading as normal, but then just stops and disappears off my screen and from my Task Manager. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling 2024 individually to fix the problem, but that didn't work. My other versions (2025/2026) work despite the issue with 2024. 

Manually changing the position of a guideline now requires an additional step.  Steps to Reproduce:Add a guideline to a composition. Right click it, and select “Edit Guide”.In the old Edit Guide dialog box, I used to be able to press the Delete key one time, type the new number, press Enter, and the guideline would move without ever having to click the box. Now, I have to highlight the FULL text in the text box and delete it, then type the new number.  

We are developing a native SmartFX effect on macOS/Apple silicon, tested in AE 26.5x89. We need to analyze the current frame's upstream alpha at a consistent resolution while rendering Full/Half/Quarter previews. This is not a request for a historical frame or time-remapping support.The effect derives content bounds and occupied cells from alpha. Reduced input can lose a faint detail and change the occupied-cell set, which then changes the timing of other visible cells. We can reproduce that in AE with a synthetic 32×8 PNG: two opaque 4×4 corner patches and one alpha=4/255 pixel. At Quarter, the faint feature disappears while the opaque patches remain. Input dimensions or a conservative bounding rectangle alone cannot supply the missing occupancy information.Ordinary SmartFX checkout supplies the complete required extent in our text test, but PF_RenderRequest has no documented per-checkout resolution override. Our isolated diagnostic also tried this acquisition chain:1. PFInterfaceSuit

I’ve an interesting issue.  I have spent a bit of time recreating the look of AE’s expression editor as a Per Character styling expression.  It’s not complete yet, but serves my purposes… but the per-frame render time add 5s each frame.  And rendering out a 90 second sequence took 90 minutes. I’m wondering if there’s a way to bake the expression styling once done. Here’s the code if anyone wants to experiment:///// HEX COLOR CONFIGURATION //////var hexBase = "#D4D4D4"; // Off-whitevar hexBlue = "#3E8FE1"; // Blue (Keywords)var hexLtBlue = "#48D9FD"; // Light Blue (Numbers)var hexPink = "#F67476"; // Pink (Strings)var hexYellow = "#9D9039"; // Yellow (Brackets)var hexLightYellow = "#DCBE84"; // Yellow (reserved terms)var hexGreen = "#6A9955"; // Green (Comments)var hexCursor = "#FFFFFF"; // White (Cursor)///// Convert Hex to AE-friendly RGB [0,1]function hexToRgb(hex) { var r = parseInt(hex.slice(1, 3), 16) / 255; var g = parseInt(hex.slice(3, 5), 16) / 255; var

i can’t find the contextual task bar after hiding temporally and inot know how find now 

Issue:Multiple critical regressions and long-standing workflow bugs in recent After Effects builds are severely disrupting professional VFX/post-production pipelines. Key native features—including Object Matte, Scene Edit Detection, and Auto-Save—are suffering from severe bugs that make them unusable or dangerous for client-facing work.As professional artists paying an ongoing Creative Cloud subscription, having to rely on external tools or spend double the time manually fixing broken automated features (or losing progress due to Auto-Save failures) is completely unacceptable.Issue 1: Object Matte (Model v4) — Severe Performance & Edge Chatter Steps to Reproduce: Import 4K ProRes 4444 footage into a composition. Apply the Object Matte tool using default Version 4.0. Select a basic, clear subject in a shot. Propagate the matte across the timeline. Expected Result: Clean, stable, full-resolution matte edges with fast propagation leveraging workstation hardware (T

I’m having multiple issues with a project and rather than trying to explain in detail every problem, It’d be a whole lot easier to just share my screen with an After Effects expert and show them what the problems are.

Hi all,The behaviour of the zoom is reversed. When “centered” it follows the cursor and viceversa. 

Hello,I have this weird thing happening in AE 2026 (Version 26.5.0 Build 89) on Win11:I created a simple comp to generate a Mogrt from. I did this hundreds of times of the last years so I know the procedure.This time however, when hitting the Export Motion Graphics Template… button in the Essential Graphics Window, AE only creates a Temporary Comp for Preview Generation (basically a duplicate of the comp I creating a Mogrt from).AE doesn’t give me the typical window for further details of where to store it/what to include/etc.It simply stops after generating that duplicate comp.I tried the same thing on Mac and it works as it should. Same version, same build: AE 2026 Version 26.5.0 Build 89.On the Win11 machine, I emptied all the caches, even reset all the preferences to default, comp 3D renderer set to Classic, etc. Nothing works.I attached a video of the whole process...What to do? Is it a bug?Please advice. Thank you. 

Have tried all sorts of varieties of drivers, hardware acceleration on/off, Windows display scaling, high DPI Windows compatibility settings for application launch, nVidia Control Panel app settings, different cables, ports on my GPU, etc. Even fresh installed Windows 11 and AE and still have the issue. The most frustrating is the preferences panel does not size properly and cuts off buttons/options - making it basically useless.Clipped preferences window.In addition to that, pretty regular flickering of UI elements when resizing panels.Often the mouse cursor's hit detection boxes when resizing is extremely narrow. Divider borders feel like "dead zones". The mouse sometimes doesn’t change to the resize icon.  System info    Application: After Effects v26.5.0.89    OS: Windows v10.0.26200, RAM: 93.61 GB GB, CPUs (logical): 32GPU - nVidia RTX 4080, Studio Driver 616.92

Any and every file I import from Cinema 4D into After Effects has the sequence much shorter than the file in Cinema 4D. But it is always 3 seconds long. I have adjusted the length in Cinema 4D. I have also clean installed after effects and all. I am on a mac with the newest version of the OS and the Cloud.

Is there a way to take a precomp and eliminate it and simultaneously move all the elements within it up stream to the parent composition while maintaining all keyframe data?Funny enough, I've never had to do this until now, but another way to ask this is: can one simply move items out of a precomp into its parent?Thanks forum.

Issue: In Local Axis Mode, the 3D Transform Gizmo's Z (depth) handle translates the layer along World Z instead of its local Z when dragged in the Active Camera or any perspective view. Local X and Y handles are unaffected. The same local-Z move performed in an orthographic view works correctly, isolating the fault to the gizmo's perspective-view drag rather than the transform engine.Steps to reproduce:Create a 3D Camera Tracked comp of a scene, add solids using the camera tracked points. In the Tools panel, select Local Axis Mode. With the comp set to Active Camera (or any perspective view), drag the gizmo's blue Z (depth) handle back and forth using a solid.Expected result: The layer translates along its local Z axis (its facing/depth direction), consistent with Local Axis Mode.Actual result: The layer translates along World Z, ignoring Local Axis Mode. Local X and Y handles behave correctly — only Z is affected. Dragging the same layer along local Z in an orthographic view (e.g. Top

Hi there, I’m on 2026.5.0 on a Mac Studio M2 chip running MacOS 26.6.2. Cryptomatte is not working consistently in this latest version. When freshly opened for the first time, I can apply Cryptomatte and select a single color to create a matte and after that the plugin becomes almost entirely unresponsive. Shift+clicking other colors does nothing in the viewport. Deselecting the current color does nothing in the viewport. The only indication I have that something is happening under the hood is that when I shift click to add colors to the matter I see the additional color ID being added to the list of color IDs that cryptomatte is using, but the minute I move my cursor off of said color, the ID disappears and nothing happens. The viewport is unchanged by this as well. Clicking a second color and seeing the ID list update is only showing in the effect control panel. the additional selected color in the viewport remains its original color. Once this behavior begins it occurs in every othe

Steps to recreate:-Create a Comp-Create a text layer (point or paragraph doesn’t matter)-Type in something like test01, or test6, or MyLayer72 (Must have a number at the end)-On the layers SourceText add the expression: thisLayer.name-Duplicate the layer at least 2 times (1 time does not appear to recreate the issue)-Highlight the duplicated layers and change the font size.  The name of the selected layers will start climbingWorks in ‘Legacy ExtendScript’ and ‘Javascript Expression’ engine.Can recreate it in After Effects 26.0.0 and 25.1.0 Windows 

can you please fix mocha AE to work with Mac OS 27.0 golden gate? it wont open now that i upgraded my OS. but i'm able to open mocha pro just fine. i'm using after effects 2025. 

I have used After Effects for over 10 years. Over approximately the last two years, a recurring issue has made basic timeline editing unreliable. It still occurs in After Effects 2026 on Windows. This workflow did not previously cause this behaviour.Steps to reproduce in an affected project:1. Open a heavier composition containing multiple animated layers.2. Select multiple layers, particularly all layers in the timeline.3. A blue spinning busy cursor appears and persists. After Effects remains partially responsive, but interaction becomes difficult and the cursor keeps spinning.4. Select a block of keyframes with the intention of copying and pasting them further down the timeline.5. After Effects hangs and the edit cannot be completed.Expected result:Layer and keyframe selection should complete, the busy cursor should clear, and normal copying and pasting should remain possible.Actual result:Selecting layers leaves a persistent busy cursor and partial responsiveness. Subsequently sele

Hello! Some days ago i've found that my after effects eye dropper isn't working properly. I know that it's an old issue, but is there any fix? I need to use ofter to pick colors, and the hex numbers wont match them, unless the color that I want to pick is inside my composition (on project thumbnail it keeps getting the wrong color, same at motion tools plugin that collect the color palette).