After Effects 24.0 EXTREMELY slow

[Bruno T. Augusto]

I don't know if everyone is having this problem, but After Effects is absolutely impossible to work. I'm working using simple shapes, a gradient layer and a text layer. And After Effects is just slow with something so simple like that. Inside the program, the mouse movement gets really laggy, it takes forever to render. And I'm not using external files, I'm not using adjustment layers and I'm not using any Motion Blur.

I'm feeling After Effects is getting worse and worse on each version Adobe release. And there's no way the problem is my computer, since I'm using a Mac Studio with M1 Max, 64Gb RAM and 4T storage. I can't find a resonable explanation for all this lag on every project.

Honestly, I'm starting to think about migrating to another software, since Adobe seems to just ignore all the After Effects problems.

[jenkmeister]

@BRDy Any chance you are able to install the 24.4 AE Beta and see if that helps your project work better? There are a series of fixes in 24.3 and 24.4 that are specific to the Apple silicon machines and memory usage. I don't know for sure if it'll fix your situation (depending upon the grading tools, there have been past situations with a few different plugins holding onto memory in a way AE can't recover) but if it's not those plugins, the fixes we have put in might help. 

[BRDy]

I'm not using any 3rd party plugins, just what is native in After Effects, Lumietri and Unsharp Mask.

I'm going to update macOS to 14.4, and will try the 24.3 beta.

i just had the same memory message in Premier on my MacBook Air, M1, 16GBs RAM and 1TB SSD. Working from version 24.0.3, in macOS 13.6.4.

footage is ProRes 1080p60 in a 180p24 sequence. And ProRes 4Kp60, in a 4Kp24 sequence. Same effects, Lumietri and Unsharp Mask.

[BRDy]

My Premier Exports in Media Encoder (from Premier) on my MacBook Pro M2 Pro are still going, but they are taking quite a while and the Activity Monitor is reading a lot of memory usage.

[BRDy]

Here's Afer Effects Beta on a MacBook Air M1, 16GBs RAM, 1TB SSD. Working from and rendering to a 2TB USB-C external SSD.

footage and render is 1080p ProRes.

[BRDy]

Sorry that was the After Effects 24.4 beta in macOS 13.6.4.

will have a 14.4 test soon.

[TLWestgate68]

I haven't worked in AE for a few months. Now I do a motion graphics video and my AE takes 2 hours and 47 minutes to render a 2 minute 24 second video? This is nothing fancy, just a template from Digital Juice. It's not even using any plugins!

My PC is an Alienware Aurora R12 with 32GB of RAM and a 3080Ti graphics card running Windows Home 10 64-bit.

I tested this render against my work Macbook Pro 2021 running Ventura 13.6.3 on the M1 Pro chip. It took only 1 hour 24 minutes (which still seems high).

This is unacceptable. All software and graphics drivers are up to date as of a reboot overnight. This needs to be fixed immediately.

[Jonas33876031tfki]

My PC rig is working well with AE 2024 with rare random crashes - but my mate with an m2 has an extremely slow experience with no plugins. Just my 10 cents.

[Losar36700292loau]

how do you get a direct installer for 2020 after effects version 17? I really wanna downgrade it but I don't see version 17 anywhere

[choxy247073237g8c]

The same project that took 22min to render in AE 2023 in 2024. takes 2h and 30min!!

Everything is the same consirning hardware and software just new and "improved" AE.

And to work within a project is just hell on earth, pure torture. I don't get it, if your new version is not ready

for release why you don't delay release until you make it funcinal. People would be much more 

understanding with delayed release, than with new versions that don't work and loses everybody eons of time.

[֑nubnubbud]

They don't allow it, though I don't see anything wrong with grabbing a version from davy jones' locker if you're paying for a subscription anyway. They say they don't allow you to use old versions for "security" reasons but it's partially because it contains stuff Adobe isn't lisenced to distribute anymore (or ever was, in retrospect) and they just don't want to support old versions.

Basically, they did some iffy stuff and pushed the legal responsibility and lost revenue onto their users by not offering refunds when a deal with dolby went bad around 2012-2014, And continue to do so more recently too. 

[carloo20891347]

Had same problem, disabled "Faux Bold" from Character ad text layer now moves perfectly... hope it hleps

[jenkmeister]

If you try 24.5 Beta, you should find FauxBold is now working with better performance. 

[srk5e8a]

Hi there, I've been trying to solve this problem for 3 days. And there was an incredible slowness in my file, which only contained a few text and a few graphic shapes. It took me minutes to type something new or move the texts or images. And I couldn't solve the problem in any way. I tried loooots of things believe me. After this comment, I thought of downloading the beta. And now everything seems to be fixed in the beta version. I hope Adobe make a stable version of this asap. By the way, I am a Macbook M1 user and I am using it with the latest Sonoma 14.5.

[Visual-Voyager]

I have the same issue and I do have to use older versions (2020 best so far) so it runs OK. How is that even possible? Aint it supposed to run faster and smoother with each new version? Or is this a Hallmark for Adobe to do Regression!

And no, its not my Mac fault since I do run very intence simulations on it. 

[֑nubnubbud]

Nah it's gotten worse. Old school CS3 user here. It got slower even to CS6, by a significant margin, bit it still was usable, and back then rotobrush was more stable when it came out, and the other new features were at least worth it. Then in 2012 they went subscription, and every update since has only been attractive to investors and middle managers. 

Seriously, who else would take "it was a bit of a hack, so we removed multithreading, and didn't replace it" as a decent update?

[֑nubnubbud]

@jenkmeister Okay but you do understand that the fact some fonts will just slow down everything and maybe cause timeouts or crashes is a significant issue and suggests deeper problems, right?

[jenkmeister]

@nubnubbud  Absolutely. It is why we've had a developer full-time on our font system for the past year. There was a lot to clean up from the various new font technologies (e.g. variable fonts) that have come online over the past few years. Still more issues to go but we are working on it.

As to your multi-threaded comment, yes, there was a long period of time where the multi-core CPUs weren't being utilized. But that hasn't been the case since the 2022 release. The latest AMD CPUs combined with Windows 11 and an appropriate amount of RAM can push 192 cores at one time in AE. 

[֑nubnubbud]

It's nice to know you have at least a single guy on it, hoping it's an actual GPU accelerated UI. Having it compete with CPU resources for rendering makes it real spotty.

But for multithreading, i don't consider throwing the same entire process at multiple cores, multithreading. The notable issue is that it's unreliable whether or not the next frame will complete in time because only one core works on it. It's a stutter machine at best, and a luck-based preview at worst. If all the cores (or half, even) could work on the next frame, you would get previews approaching realtime without a GPU- you could get much more reliable frame timing without saying "your cores dictate the chunk size of a render, not the speed".

Of course, some effects will always need CPU or a genius to make them work on GPU and that's alright! But in the UI, please add a little icon of a GPU or CPU so we know which ones won't bog down our systems.

[HunchoDreams]

This is some valuable insight.

[chantz27413319rbcb]

omgg same my after effects won't stop lagging and its annoying because I can't see the preview as it keeps stopping.. moving forward I think y'all should take away the green line under the timeline as the preview thing because my after effects is completely unusable and I will NOT pay for a software that doesn't work properly. Also you guys should automatically save to files or save it to the account because I had to remake the same edit about 4 - 5 times all because the app is bugging out. Please respond to this message as soon as you can , thank you . 

[????36896533kxgy]

I just updated to 24.5 (Build 52) and the lag got reduced massively. I checked my activity monitor (mac) and it's now using at least 10GB unlike the previous version about 18GB RAM, which was annoying because I'm only doing 2D projects. Hopefully, this goes well!