Community Manager

Question

After Effects (Beta) now on Apple Silicon

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
October 26, 2021
46 replies
93287 views

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!

Feedback

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H

hexjibber

Participant

Hi,

Thanks for all the hard work on the Beta. I've noticed significantly faster speeds on all of my projects and near real time preview at full resolution.

However, I was wondering if any work was being done to speed up Classic 3D performance? I do a lot of motion comics and parallax scenes in 2.5D and these sequences still lag in anything except quarter resolution.

I have a 16" MacBook Pro M1 Max with 64GB RAM and 32 core GPU. So I have plenty of power to throw at it.

Thanks!

Andy.

JohnColombo17100380

Author

Community Manager

After Effects (Beta) on Apple silicon - Feb 24th, 2022 Update

Hi everyone! Happy belated New Year from the After Effects team. We hope your 2022 has gotten off to a great start. As always, thank you all so much for your continued comments and feedback for After Effects (Beta) on Apple silicon.

Starting in Beta builds posted earlier this week, the features available when running AE (Beta) natively on Apple silicon are a near-match to the features available in AE on other platforms. The latest features to be ported are Content-Aware Fill for video and SWF import.

SWF import specifically has been requested by many of you and it is now available as of build 22.3.0.82 and later of After Effects (Beta). Please give it a try and let us know if you encounter any issues. We are continuing to work with the Animate team to bring FLA import to AE (Beta) on Apple silicon as well; it is currently working in some cases, but may not work in others.

Recent changes:

Content-Aware Fill for video is now available when running natively on Apple silicon.
SWF import is now available when running natively on Apple silicon. Work to support FLA import is ongoing.
All of the Mocha plug-ins that ship with After Effects are now Universal.
The "Track in Boris FX Mocha" command is again available in the Animation menu.
Rendering issues with the Lumetri and Invert effects when running in Software Only mode have been fixed.

Known Issues:

The aerender command-line renderer and other background rendering processes always launch as native processes, rather than following the preference for "Open using Rosetta", so Intel-only third-party plug-ins are excluded from resulting renders. This affects AE renders from Media Encoder and AE comps the Premiere Pro sequences.
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.

Many of you have asked when this porting work will move out of Beta and into the release version. The most honest answer is "when it is ready", as determined by a combination of our internal testing and feedback from Beta users like you. With that in mind, please continue to put the AE (Beta) on Apple silicon through its paces and let us know where it performs well and where it may not.

Thank you for your continued patience in our responses. As you might be able to tell from other recent Beta forum announcements, the team is very busy both improving the core of the AE application as well as improving the user experience overall. Thank you again for all your valuable feedback for AE (Beta) on Apple silcon.

Cheers,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team

Zach Rowe

Known Participant

Thanks John and AE Engineering Team. AE Beta has been increasingly stable for me and I use it exclusively on my M1 Pro. One of the plugins I use more than any other is video copilot's FX Console. Is there a way that I can install and use this in the beta version of AE?

JohnColombo17100380

Author

Community Manager

Hi @Zach Rowe,

If I remember correctly, the VCP FX Console has both a scripted component and a plug-in component which work together. The scripted side should work fine on M1, but the plug-in will need to updated by VCP themselves to be compatible with AE (Beta) running natively on M1. I would expect FX Console to work fine when AE (Beta) is run under Rosetta emulation, but obviously that sacrifices the performance of running natively.

Cheers,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team

am2082

Known Participant

@JohnColombo17100380 First off, thank you to you and your team for being so responsive and communicating with us here on these posts.

While this request isn't related to After Effects, we can't seem to get a response from the Audition team. Would it be possible to give an update on the ability to have Folders/Bins in Audition like there is in every other Adobe Software? There has been no update from the team in over a year, and being on the inside, if you could pass along that message or even perhaps provide any guidance or update it would be so greatly appreciated!!

JohnColombo17100380

Author

Community Manager

Hi @am2082,

I don't know if there are any updates on folders/bins for project organization in Audition. As an Audition user myself, I agree that it would be a welcome addition to the Audition workflow. It appears that the addition of folders/bins is the highest-voted feature on Audition's UserVoice page: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911314/suggestions/33841873 and Under Review, so the Audition team is certainly aware of it even they have not been responsive recently. I will pass along the message to them as well.

Cheers,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team

danielkano

Participant

When will the regular version run in Apple M1 natively?

christianm63678893

Participant

Great question!!!!!

Alexander Eberhard

Inspiring

Just started rendering using AME for my After Effects beta project. Rending in GPU mode with a simple FullHD Animation almost kills my cpu. Look at these temps, i did ramp up my fans manually to almost max. I am MacbookPro 14 with M1 Max. There must be something wrong! Same happens when I set preview to full quality. Temps just go crazy...

trashcaneron

Inspiring

Is there a place where one can sign up for release news on this?

S

Steve2176754208nr

Participating Frequently

Using a 13" MacBook Pro 16GB / M1

I've been using the M1 beta since it begun but this is also when I first started using AE so don't have experience of what AE before this. Having said that, I've been having some issues when sending projects to the Media Encoder. Regardless of what project I'm working on, the first few renders that I send to ME seem to work fine, but after rendering several more iterations as the project develops, at some point the progress bar of an export gets "stuck" and never recovers. Eventually the ME application crashes and after reopening doesn't work at all -- i.e. projects sent from AE to ME just never appear. I then have to do a full system restart to resolve the issue.

I don't know if this is just a "thing" with the pipeline from AE to ME that perhaps predates this beta, but thought I would raise it here. Does anybody else experience this behaviour? By the way, I'm using the ME beta since I figured that would go hand-in-hand with the AE beta. Maybe I should be using the current (Intel) ME application.

christianm63678893

Participant

MBP 16" M1max 64GB ram. Monterey 12.1 Running Beta. Almost real time preview for the first time in decades is amazing! Rendering is fast. However, every 20 to 30 minutes or so I get SBBD. Spinning beach ball of death. Happened when Ive manually saved, tried to edit some Saphire transition plugins or generally just when about my own business doing nothing out of the ordinary. I have never experienced these types of hangs in years. I usually have to force quit as it says its "not responding". Whats the eta on development. Because so far I'm blown away by the preview speed. Haven't seen this since you got rid of multiple frame rendering in 2014.

A

Anonymous

I just imported an animation project with an underwater world and some easy fish animation in 2D. 10 Seconds after opening AE all cores just boost up to 75 degrees and fans kick in hard. I have not done anything. Doesnt seem to work at all then on my M1 Max with 32 GB. Any idea or settings to fix this yet?

JohnColombo17100380

Author

Community Manager

Hi @22688710,

Thank you for reporting this issue. Do you have Cache Frames When Idle enabled in the Composition menu under the Preview submenu? Please try disabling Cache Frame When Idle and let us know if the unexpected jump in core/fan activity goes away.

Could you provide more details on the behavior you're seeing after the boost to core/fan activity? Would it be possible for you to send us the project you are opening?

Thanks again for reporting and for any further information,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team

Z

zimnowskic

Participant

Installed the beta on a new M1 pro laptop, and whenever I add a text layer and change the font I get this crash "After Effects (beta) error: crash occurred while invoking plug-in "Character Palette""

I've tried resetting preferences as others have recommended, what other things should I try? Even in the non beta I get this error.

JohnColombo17100380

Author

Community Manager

Hi @zimnowskic,

Thank you for reporting this issue, sorry to see that you're experiencing this crash. What typeface is shown in the Character panel before you attempt to change it? The issue you describe sounds like you may have a bad typeface installed that potentially causes a crash when read by the Character panel. If you can, try disabling non-OS fonts through Apple's Font Book app ( which should come with macOS ) and see if that helps you avoid the crash. Does this same crash occur in the Premiere or any other Adobe apps?

Thanks again for reporting and for any further information you can offer,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team

Z

zimnowskic

Participant

So I had set up a new M1 MBP, and the only font I had installed other than the ones that came preinstalled were the SF fonts downloaded directly from Apple. As a mobile designer I need these fonts installed and never had issues before with them. I've been able to use After Effects if I just keep the font set to Helvetica, but as soon as I switch to any of the SF fonts the app crashes.

Just tried in PS 2022 and I can select the same font without crashing.

K

kamil514

Participant

Hi guys, first of all, thanks for your work! The results in render times on M1 Max are amazing but I stubbled on some problems with plugins. I'm running the beta of AE 22.2, AE is running with Rosetta for plugins compatibility but when I start to render with anything other than the AE render queue one of the plugins stops working and is not visible in the output video. It works perfectly fine in AE itself with Rosetta enabled but when I start rendering with BG Renderer MAX or Media Encoder it looks like aerenderengine (apple based) doesn't work with Rosetta emulated plugins and removes it from the output video. Is there any fix for this? I tried enabling Rosetta for Media Encoder aswell but it doesn't work either, the plugin is still invisible in the output video. The plugin I'm taking about is Video Copilot Optical Flares. The last version of AE beta it was working fine was 22.1 which is still Intel based I think. Thanks for any help!

JohnColombo17100380

Author

Community Manager

Hi @kamil514,

Thanks very much for reporting this issue. We are able to reproduce the failure as well. It looks like there are two similar render paths that aren't working when using Rosetta: rendering through Adobe Media Encoder and rendering using third-party render managers like BG Renderer MAX that utilize the aerender command-line renderer. Each of these will need to be addressed separately.

Our team is now investigating possible fixes to allow the rendering of After Effects compositions through Media Encoder with Rosetta emulation. For third-party render managers like BG Renderer MAX, the developers of those products will need to update their product to support running the command line aerender process under Rosetta as needed.

Thanks again for making this bug report,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team

K

kamil514

Participant

Thanks for the answer John! I already reached out to BGR dev and waiting for a response. Please keep us updated about this!

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