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Inspiring
September 28, 2022

Interface is Slow and Laggy

  • September 28, 2022
  • 312 replies
  • 33461 views
Dear Adobe,

Me again.

Please stop everything that you're doing with the development of new bells and whistles and doodads and put all your resources and firepower into resolving the years-old issue of the Slow and Laggy Interface in After Effects. Seriously. It's been YEARS. I kept thinking, "ah, they'll fix it soon.." and hope for the best and I end up feeling like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football every time a new update for After Effects comes out. "Maybe they fixed it!" And it's still not fixed.

When I contact Support I'm told, "the issue that you are facing is a known issue and the same has been highlighted to the designated team who are working on getting the issue fixed in the future releases," but it has yet to be fixed.

Old After Effects was FASTER on OLDER laptops - I have been on modern workstation-build DESKTOPS that are slower in response. Makes me not want to work in After Effects. I feel bad for those starting out in motion graphics in 2020 and this is what they are introduced to.

SpaceX put two astronauts on the space station. Surely we can get a butter smooth interface in After Effects.

Thank you.

https://vimeo.com/441661685/b7aba12cba

312 replies

Participating Frequently
February 9, 2023

So I bought a 5K HIDPI wide monitor. Guys, don't make the same mistake. It is impossible to work in AE anymore. And I am on 18core MacPro with AMD6900XT, NVME cache disk and 128GB RAM!!! Every move takes agaes. I can't use paint anymore, because the cursor brush flickers. If i scrub the timeline the preview goes crazy. Guess what. Every other app (Final Cut, Resolve, Fusion, Nuke, Mocha, Silhouette runs absolutely fluent).

Also Photoshop has the same problem now, I can't paint at all.

 

I think Adobe needs a competitor for After Effects. Just to wake up.

 

 

Inspiring
January 27, 2023

Would be great to get a response from Adobe here. The interface lag actively makes every person who uses this software daily on complex projects WORSE. The 100+ comments don't lie.

 

This is the #1 issue pushing me to pursue other software. 

rubenskv
Participant
December 23, 2022

Ok, so since release of after 23 (trackmatte) I jumped the hype, and against all my concerns I upgraded to the "new" "best" software. Only not. Same problema here: Lag UI. It was as bad as 1 layer, 1 keyframe, to mouse drag and to lag, and miss the location intended. Tried all wistles and bells to remedy the problem (revomed all scripts pannel, back to 1080p, 1 monitor only, change DPI scaling, hardware pannel acceleration off, you name it. Only to fail, and made me think: Maybe on older version is better? Ok, tried v.22, and every UI lag gonne away. It's responsive again, not perfect but no hell I been in the past month. Track matte and color key frames can wait.

 

Maybe, just maybe, it's a BUG? 

 

Screenshot of my 4k + 2.k + 1k monitors. 125% dpi windows, all pannels open;

All fine now, no crazy ui lag for me.

Ps. This is a recurrent problem for me, Since 2014...

 

 

nubnubbud
Inspiring
November 30, 2022

@Warren Heaton10841144 
this is a bug report, not a feature request, and Adobe is aware of it, and uses language including "known issue" and " getting the issue fixed", confirmiung that it's considered a bug internally, too. I can back this up, they gave me the same response.
I might be able to elucidate things further.
some software bugs aren't strictly "bugs" as in typos or errors in otherwise proper code. This can be seen in Blender's (I use blender, as it's a very well managed codebase) bug reporting ettiquite.

The most basic description of a "bug" is "when a program's expected result does not match what happens". This can be something like a calculator app saying 1+1= 2.19533, and that's the most generic bug. Another kind of bug is when you press a button in a program, and it does something you don't expect it to do, such as pressing the "+" button once to add, but if you press it a second time, it undoes the operation. 
Whether or not it is intended or known functionality (perhaps the developer wanted a sleek undo without more keys) the end result is "hey, why isn't this working like it's supposed to?". This goes to the origin of the term "bug", in which proper code was broken by literal insects shorting connections in early computers, and not by improper code. 

and that's why "hey, why doesn't After effects play when I press play?" and "why doesn't it stop tracking when I press stop?" and "why does minimizing and maximizing the program accelerate its processing?" are properly reportable bugs. Feature, intended, known- all or none of the above, the program's UI stuttering, hitching, and not recognizing keypresses is acting in an unexpected and unwanted way to both users and developers, and therefore a bug.

I believe this bug is the result of a long and troubled trail of neglected or improperly performed UI refreshes, that results in a user interface which responds to backend processes in unexpected ways, such as hitching or not registering button presses.

Warren Heaton
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 30, 2022

This feature request isn't written correctly.  In meantime, learn more keyboard shortcuts.

MrMaxBre
Participating Frequently
November 30, 2022

Luck won't give us responsive UI in After Effects, unfortunately 🙂

Warren Heaton
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 29, 2022

@MrMaxBre 

 

Good luck, Manrali.

 

 

MrMaxBre
Participating Frequently
November 29, 2022

@Carlos Zenzuke Albarran  is right, this IS one of the examples of a laggy UI everybody who serilusly works in AE can experience daily.

@Warren Heaton10841144you're clearly missing a point here, this UI lag is not connected to uncompressed footage or any AE preview settings at all. It is present even with Caps Lock ON ..

Warren Heaton
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 29, 2022

You think that's an example of a slow and laggy interface?

 

Do you mean that you'd like to see refinements for faster user interaction?  

Carlos Zenzuke Albarran
Participating Frequently
November 29, 2022

Are you sure? Because in School of Motion's own video showing the new features of AE the interface seems pretty choppy when selecting and moving keyframes, just like I'm used to: https://youtu.be/fG4yZTpTGlk?t=65

And you are still confusing UI responsiveness with render performance, and they're extremely different things, and the AE team knows they're different. They've been tackling the render speed challenges, but we're talking about the UI here, and please don't mention composition resolution or bitrate unless you're trying to gaslight us for whatever reason.