Horrendous problems when using Paint/Clone Paint on v23 (Silicon)

Report · Nov 29, 2022

I am doing some clean-up on TIF sequences, and am finding that the software very quickly runs into issues. It particularly hates when I reference other layers, and gets gradually slower and slower as I work through the sequence until it hangs and I'm forced to restart.

The only workaround I have found is to export as a new TIF sequence and keep working into it. But that is obviously not a viable solution, and I hope to God it's a temporary workaround.

I am using a 16 inch 2021 16-core M1 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB RAM, and the way things are at the moment, it's giving my 2015 iMac with 16GB RAM and a Fusion Drive a run for its money. It is unusable and unacceptable that it's performing this badly and I cannot workout what to do.

OS Monterey, version is V23 (up-to-date as of this post). You can reproduce this issue by adding enough paint layers to large TIF sequences, and should find the only way out of it eventually is to restart AE.

Report · Dec 02, 2022

Discussing internally about this and it appears this may have been an issue for quite a few years. And for you, likely made worse by the memory issues on the M1 machines that we've discussed in the Low Memory thread.

The issue appears to be painting/cloning over multiple frames gets AE into a state where AE stops finding cached frames and is recalculating every paint stroke in the whole comp over all the frames. As you add more strokes, that recalculation takes longer and longer.

There is a note from a while ago on a bug report: "Painting several frames then pre-rendering those frames and starting a new paint job on subsequent frames. The other workaround is to use Photoshop to do this painting but Photoshop painting is permanent or destructive unlike AE where I can come back and remove a stroke if I wish."

Which sounds like what you've been doing with exporting the TIF sequence.

Will update here as I learn more.

Report · Dec 02, 2022

Hi Jenkmeister,

Thanks for looking into this! Very interesting indeed. I had imagined that this might be what was happening but I’m not a programmer, so I wasn’t sure.

Is this something that can be addressed in an upcoming release?

In the meantime, I am using JPG proxies. If you are able to advise a way to pre-render the paint without my having to render the entire sequence and bake it in, I’d love to know.

Thank you so much for investigating.

Best,

Steve

Report · Dec 02, 2022

I'm going to try to get this onto our backlog so that we can further investigate and see if we can find a fix into beta in the next couple of weeks. The history of the issue indicates it may take a bit to fix (which is why it's been deferred over time) so I'll know more once we get someone working on it.

I'll also see if we can find any other workarounds for you and let you know.

Report · Dec 02, 2022

Per @jenkmeister's comments, marking this issue under investigation.

Report · Dec 03, 2022

Thanks @JohnColombo / @jenkmeister - an update. It did the same thing with the JPG proxy once I got to 130 or so frames. It wasn't even that intense in terms of work, and it's inconsistent behaviour; at one point, earlier last week, I'd gotten to 1500 layers or so. But yeah, really frustrating that I basically can't use this Mac for any intensive AE work until it gets sorted. The memory issues compounded by this just make it a real mess.

Is there a way for you have AE look at the paint layers existing on each frame, and have it treat that as the thing to cache? Effectively breaking each paint layer up if it's longer than 1 frame? I've definitely found this issue is worse with held layers. The 1500-odd layer paint job I did was mostly on singles, and it was after that when I started to have overlapping layers and held layers that it seemed to get confused. Which correlates with what you're saying appears to be happening with its re-calculations.