After Effects (Beta) now on Apple Silicon

[JohnColombo]

We are very pleased to announce that a version of After Effects which runs natively on Apple silicon is now available for beta testing. Starting today in build 22.1.1.9, After Effects (Beta) will run natively on Macs that use the Apple M1 family of processors. You are invited to test it out and please let us know if anything isn't working as you expect. Please also try it out together with the latest Betas of Premiere Pro and Media Encoder. We are looking forward to hearing your feedback!

This first version of After Effects (Beta) for Apple silicon contains all the core functionality of the app, including nearly all native effects, all layer types, Roto Brush 2, Draft 3D, and, of course, Multi-Frame Rendering. After Effects has greatly benefited from the work done to bring Premiere Pro to Apple silicon, which included our team porting AE's render pipeline to support Motion Graphics Templates. Since After Effects and Premiere Pro share components for many media formats, you can expect to see the same media types available for use in After Effects (Beta) as are available in Premiere Pro on Apple silicon.

There are currently a few limitations and known issues when running After Effects (Beta) natively on Apple silicon which are listed below. We will post updates to this forum as these issues are fixed and new builds become available.

Features Not Yet Available

These features are still in the process of being ported for Apple silicon. All of the listed components should continue to work if After Effects (Beta) is run under Rosetta.

• Content-Aware Fill for Video Available in After Effects (Beta) 22.2.0.99 and later
• Importing Animate/Flash files Available in After Effects (Beta) 22.3.0.82 and later
• Importing clips using the Cineform codec
• Keylight Available in After Effects (Beta) 22.2.0.30 and later
• Mocha AE Available in After Effects (Beta) 22.2.0.30 and later
• Cineware Available in After Effects (Beta) 22.1.1.50 and later
• C4D Renderer Available in After Effects (Beta) 22.1.1.50 and later

Third-Party Integrations

With the large number of plug-ins, scripts, and extensions available for After Effects, it is likley that some of them may not work when After Effects (Beta) is running natively on Apple silicon. In these cases, please contact the third-party developer to see if there is a new version available that has been updated for Apple silicon.

All third-party plug-ins must be updated by their developers in order to be compatible with After Effects running natively on Apple silicon. Third-party plug-ins that have already been ported for Apple silicon should show up and behave as expected. Incompatible plug-ins will not be available for use when After Effects (Beta) runs natively on Apple silicon and will appear as "Missing" when opening existing projects that use them. To use installed plug-ins that have not been updated, see the instructions below on how to run After Effects (Beta) under Rosetta 2 emulation.

Any installed plug-ins that aren't compatible with Apple silicon will be listed in a new dialog shown when After Effects (Beta) launches. You can disable this dialog by selecting "Never Again" before dismissing it. To show the dialog again after disabling it, reset the application preferences.

Known Issues

• Drivers for Transmit hardware may be currently unsupported and require updates.
• Rendering the Detail-preserving Upscale effect for previews and output will be slower than expected. Work to optimize the performance of Detail-preserving Upscale on Apple silicon is ongoing.
• Having Blackmagic Desktop Video 12.1 installed can cause a crash when After Effects is launched. Please update Blackmagic Desktop Video to version 12.2 or higher to avoid this crash.

Running After Effects (Beta) under Rosetta 2 Emulation

As it has been up until now, this new version of After Effects (Beta) can still be run using Rosetta 2 emulation. Right-click on the Adobe After Effects (Beta).app, select Get Info, then enable "Open using Rosetta". This should allow you to use all of the features which are not yet available when running natively, but at the cost of some performance.

The non-beta version of After Effects will continue to run under Rosetta 2 on Apple silicon.

Thanks very much for participating in Adobe's Public Beta program. We appreciate your thoughts and feedback!

[brownpatricks]

How do we get invited to join? Is there a download somewhere?

[zandwacht]

AE public bèta's can be installed from the CC app, they're listed among the other apps you can install. You should be able to install the beta next to the normal version. File format was shared during the previous beta periode.

[Yister]

I can't find a beta in the CC app，What do I have to do to see the AE beta in the CC App？

[ChipBrown]

You have to choose "Beta Apps" from the menu at the left:

[Yister]

I did, but only one app appears in my beta app list.

[ChipBrown]

It is possible you are not in a country where the beta is live. That list is suspiciously short... I believe that not all beta versions are available worldwide.

[nemo1972]

Ooooh!! From the little testing ive done... FAAAAAST!!!

RAM Previews especially MUCH faster 🙂

[youtube22512612eyxr]

hey do  u have 8 gb varient of m1 is ram preview faster on 8gb version

pls tell me ur saying for which version

[Paulo_Soares_Lana]

Difference between AE & AE Beta.

I Rendered same project on 2 Apps, both using Adobe Media Encorder, Quicktime, Apple ProRes 4444 with Alpha.

Result:
AE (Intel): 4:42:13

AE Beta (Apple Silicon): 1:51:40

Looking good, but using just GPU to render. If it`s possible use CPU and GPU the result can be better...

[Shuhao Shang]

It's not what you think. Even the M1 built the CPU and GPU together. People who tested native M1 version Premiere rendering, the GPU only result is still better than CPU+GPU.

[thibaudl10621577]

Hello,

Works fantastic and it's very promising as a first impression! Well done guys ! Going to make a youtube review soon.

I just have one big issue. When I start a render on an M1 Pro 16 inch 16GB RAM Macbook Pro (Mercury Software Only), I get a very fast render when I boot the computer. And then as I relaunch multiple times the same render ( and I purge all the cache each time) the speed of the renders go down and down. On the first render I get close to 80-90% stable CPU usage. And on the second or third render I get these spikes (see photo below)

I have plenty of SSD space and RAM is not full. Tried hardware acceleration using Metal.. no success

It's not throttling due to heat since I've set the fans to run at maximum speed, the laptop is very cold. 

Any ideas ? 

[thibaudl10621577]

Memory usage looks okay though and plenty of disk space too : 

[thibaudl10621577]

Should this may help, here is how the CPU acts during rendering 

[JohnColombo]

HI @thibaudl10621577,

Thank you for this report and for the system performance details as well. We are attempting to repro this behavior on our end. Would you be willing to share your test project with us? If not, a description of the project's content would be helpful e.g. does it use primarily footage or Shape layers? Lots of keyframing versus expressions?

Do you see the rendering return to full speed if you close and relaunch After Effects (Beta) without rebooting the system? Or do you need to reboot the system entirely in order for the rendering to achieve optimal levels?

Thanks again for reporting this and for any further info,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

[thibaudl10621577]

Hello John,

Thanks for your reply. Here is the project file : https://www.transfernow.net/dl/20211102NQGOheBV

After deeper investigation I found a few more things : 

• The CPU activity drop always happens at around frame 37-38 on this project
• I get better performance after an After Effects restart (rebooting laptop  does not change anything) 
• The M1 MacBook 13 inch renders the project at full speed with no issue. 2-3 times faster render speed. This CPU drop ONLY happens on the M1 Pro 16 inch
• In another very heavy project (500 layers) I don’t have that CPU drop, it just renders at full power the whole time, wether it be on the 13 inch M1 or 16 inch M1 Pro
  

Running latest Monterey OS update 12.0.1 on both laptops. Both have the same level of RAM (16Gb) and available RAM.  Of course, I purge ALL memory and disk cache between each render.

Below is a picture of the CPU activity on the M1 Pro. ( I didn’t do it on the standard M1 because it is always running full speed with no issues throughout each render) 

Below is a picture of my preferences on both Laptops. 

I turned on Metal acceleration for all the tests because in the end it doesn’t look like it has an impact.

Any ideas ? 

[thibaudl10621577]

Little update. Turns out I also got the  issue on the M1 (not pro) . So it looks like we have the same problem whatever the M1 type.

[EdgeMotion]

Thanks for taking the time to work thru this and communicate your discoveries. I'm still awaiting my MBP 16 arrival, but I'm quite anxious to play around with the AE beta. I often take time to beta test and provide feedback and it's work that requires time and effort. Cheers to you!

[shivangir81995537]

Hey ! 

Did you issue got resolved? I'm facing the same issue on M1 pro 14" MacBook. Media encoder is taking too long (20min) to render 30 sec video than my PC. 4 min video is taking more than 2 hours to render in media encoder 2022 in 14" m1pro. 

[zandwacht]

Never ever render AE projects with media encoder. Just export from AE natively (render queue) to get the best performance in terms of ram, CPU and GPU. Make sure Metal is on for your project, you're using the Javascript engine and multi frame rendering is active in settings. Export as prores from AE and encode to mp4 later. If you must, latest AE can now export mp4.

[shivangir81995537]

Ahhhhhh, thanksssss so much. It got me headache with encoder's such performance. I am so relieved thanks for the info. 

[nicolass76045998]

Hello guys,

from your experience, how long does a beta phase take until it's getting released?

-thanks! 

[Xbariq]

Adobe Premiere Pro took almost 7 months in Beta phase. I hope that After effects wont take as long, my guess would be  May for a full version 

[Xbariq]

I see promising results on my 14-inch base model (m1 pro chip). The Rosetta version scored only 599 pts which is very underwhelming. Unfortunately I can't test the beta version using Puget plugin because it lacks the following: 

• Keylight
• Cineware
• C4D Renderer

I don't want to jump to a conclusion, but I guess this beta could score around 1000 on my M1 pro (comparable to my 10700k results). However, this is too early to judge. Can you please add the C4D Renderer & Keylight and Cineware in your next update? I am very interested in seeing the results. 

ALSO, SHOULD WE EXPECT 6 MONTHS OF BETA VERSION SIMILIARLY TO THE ADOBE PRIMERE PRO?  I HONESTLY CAN'T WAIT FOR THIS :)) 

[As Syukur]

Is it support AE plugings from intel?
I already installed along side AE 2022, but the plugins doesn't show in M1 AE Beta.

I'm using Mac mini M1