After effects freezes and takes forever to load

[Christopher2753023853jm]

I have recently tried using after effects to edit some videos and apply, well, some after effects.

Upon importing a 5GB MOV movie file, shot on an iPhone, after effects:

• Takes excessive amounts of time to import it and generate a preview. This is with JUST the video on the timeline. Memory usage during import peaks at 50GB (of 64GB system RAM), and/or;
• Freezes the computer entirely demanding a hard-reset (Windows 11 only).

The performance issues relating to excessive timings is present on both Windows and Mac. Freezing errors are only observed on Windows 11.

I am observing these results on some pretty capable hardware so thinks it's fair to assume the import timing issue is either a leak or an optimisation bug.

Freezing a host computer is unacceptable for any production software. This has made the software un-usable for fear of data corruption.

Software: After Effects 23.0

Different computer specs:

• 7950X, 64Gb DDR5 6000Mhz, 4090 24Gb, Windows 11 Pro
• Macbook Pro 14, M1 Pro 16Gb

Steps taken:

• Open after effects
• Create a new project
• Drag and drop a 5GB MOV file from File Explorer into the assets
• Drag and drop the imported file onto the timeline

Expected results:

• The file is imported in a reasonable timeframe without potentially causing irreversible damage and corruption to other data in use by the host computer

Actual results:

• After effects takes an extraordinary amount of time to import the file and generate a preview (an be interactive again)
• After effects frequently crashes and freezes the entire computer demanding a hard-reset (power cycle) on Windows 11, potentially causing irreversible damage and corruption to other data in use by the host computer

[nubnubbud]

first off, is this your first time using After Effects- and-
Your bug reporting is immacualte- thanks for all the specs!

How much time, by rough estimate, is it taking/what is excessive? 30 seconds? 30 minutes? 

I work on windows, and I have seen similar things happen, from my experience the program seems very much happier on an apple system for some reason, with things like this immediately treated at a top level error on the Mac side, but just accepted on everything else. No employee I've seen has spoken directly about reasons behind performance differences between windows and ios either, so no luck there.

As for it being an optimization bug- This doesn't feel like a bug at all. Adobe has a naive approach to previews and internal data handling. in both cache and RAM all footage is uncompressed raw. 5Gb of something like 4k HEVC could easily balloon out to 50Gb if it's a couple minutes long.
After effects just... isn't made for that. It doesn't use multithreading, it barely uses multiple cores at all for most things, is mostly incapable of using GPU at all, and uses RAM in about the most inefficient way possible. (stores uncompressed previews in RAM, offloads to disk cache, reloads into RAM as fast as possible.) 64GB of RAM will give you maybe 14-24 seconds of continuous 4k playback with 1 clip, for example. it's largely linear. After that, it has to shuffle between using 100% CPU to refill and dump RAM with the disk cache and render the new frame (because remember, no GPU or multithreading). Now, Macs have a little habit of quietly swapping, and are quite good with swap space- they'll use their disk to offset running out of RAM far better than Windows machines.
I've never made such an intense program myself, but it doesn't take an engineer to know a car with one wheel dragging the back end is suboptimal. Many users have valid performance concerns, and I feel because they tell their users to upgrade hardware to get proper performance, Adobe programs should actually use that hardware they tell their users to get, unlike now.

[Christopher2753023853jm]

@nubnubbud Thanks. I have used after effects for some basic vector animations previous to this but never tried importing anything of this volume. Hopefully the information helps the product team.

To be fair, as you mentioned the app probably isn't made for handling large video clips. We managed to navigate our way around things by exporting multiple clipped videos (5sec), doing what we needed and piecing them back together in Premier. 

I can appreciate the app's limitations. The lack of multi-threading and GPU utilisationis disappointing, especially given the concept of multiple threads has been a part of public computing for well over a decade now. The RAM/swap management and CPU issue makes sense too now you mention it.

I think my main frustration is that it causes failure beyond it's own scope (i.e. system failure). This type of unreliability can easily end up costing thousands of dollars in data loss, data corruption and wasted labour on each occurance.

Like yourself, I've also never made been involved in making a distributed app of this complexity and I can appreciate the challenges in making an application of this nature. I actually enjoy using it when it works and think the entire product team has made something awesome. Hopefully they can implement something that at the very least limits the scope of errors to the application.

[OussK]

try to transcode your video on adobe media encoder before you imported it to after effect, sometimes even if you see that video playing fine on any player it will not works fine on AE, so transcode your video using AME to ProRez 4.2.2 .MOV then test it on AE

[nubnubbud]

@Christopher2753023853jm well, lack of those isn't surprising, seeing as it's nearly 30 years old.
Regardless, people have bought and trained into the ecosystem and are reluctant to leave, and Adobe's gonna keep selling it as their main media workhorse till no one's willing to use it, then shoot themselves in the foot and only begin working on a replacement well after it's dead because they're afraid to compete internally. Seen it happen several times before. always goes like that with these software companies. xerox, autodesk, facebook, autodesk again for good measure because they're yesteryear's adobe but better. Complacency and lack of innovation, just throwing away good ideas... the truth is the people in command never use the software, so they're blisfully unaware when someone's got a rug-pull lined up. 

on a more immediately productive note, yeah, what you're seeing is probably (sorry to say) intended. It's not like premiere, where it will simply show you the video when you preview the video- it processes every pixel with no acceleration. It's designed so that advanced effects don't bloat preview times, at the expense of already terrible base preview times. It wasn't always this way. before RAM preview, RAM usage was manageable and processing was fast.

Simply put, After Effects is only designed to do short VFX clips. You're supposed to edit something, then if you need VFX in a 12 second shot, a computer with 64Gb of RAM should be able to manage it okay.

Basically it's After Effects' RAM preview, combined with its lack of core and CPU utilization and inability to scale to larger formats that is hurting it. From what I can tell, RAM preview was made under the assumption that there would be CPU overhead while both rendering VFX AND loading raw video to and from RAM in continuous I/O. If they were a VFX artist, they would know there's no such thing as overhead when rendering unless something is wrong or some is left unused on purpose.

oh and absolutely on the data part. I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally pressed export without thinking in the new premiere exporter, and deleted a source video because it defaults to the name and location of the first video in the timeline, and doesn't tell you about a conflict, then crashes because it's overwriting a file it's trying to access. Some of the bugs in these programs are absolutely unacceptable- I agree, and they're getting worse. I can only assume that the people making these programs are either:

• trying to code on top of old, unknown code from the pre-2k CRT screen coding ancients.
• uncaring of what they're doing/blisfully unaware of the repercussions of changes
• adding code in order to pretend their project, and position, has a reason to exist.
• are told by superiors to add or change things everyone beneath said superior knows won't work/be useful, or
• want the program to die, so they can start fresh, like us.

I actually enjoy using it when it works and think the entire product team has made something awesome. Hopefully they can implement something that at the very least limits the scope of errors to the application.

By @Christopher2753023853jm

I have both CS6 and AE22 here. I've used it every year since CS3. I regret to inform you- that it's never gotten faster or more stable in the time I've used it. The only thing that's gotten faster are the computers it's run on, but between increasing data size and rampant bloat and poor hardware code, in a recent test between CS6 and AE22 with the newest optimizations in a benchmark a community expert showed me, it was between 0% and 22% slower.

I think our best bet is just dropping the program altogether. It wasn't designed for GPU's. it wasn't designed for CPU's with more than one core, it wasn't designed for RAM in the dozens of gigs, and our modern computers have all of that. You might as well be trying to run a 70's NASA simulation on a virtual machine with hardware simulation. It's a miracle it still works, in my opinion.

I've said it before, too. If adobe hired me and provided for shelter and food, I'd sleep in the office till we had a working prototype of the next compositing software.

[Mylenium]

I've said it before, too. If adobe hired me and provided for shelter and food, I'd sleep in the office till we had a working prototype of the next compositing software.

Probably not.

Mylenium

[nubnubbud]

I didn't say they would hire me. I said I would work to make it better if paid enough to support myself. y'know, a standard employee contract or something.
but as you seem to understand, they're pretty allergic to internal competition.

[JohnColombo]

Hi @Christopher2753023853jm,

Thanks very much for reporting this issue. You've provided a lot of detail (thank you for that!) and what you've described does sound like a potential memory leak.

You mentioned a 5GB .mov file from an iPhone; what are the resolution, duration, and codec used in that file? I would not ask you to send us the 5GB file, but I would very much like to generate something similar from an iPhone here to compare the performance and try to identify any bottlenecks.

Additionally, could you try these same steps with the latest After Effects 23.1 update? That version includes a number of memory-management fixes that might allow you to get a better result. 

Thanks again for the report and for any more information you can provide,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team