Interface is Slow and Laggy

[Marc Trzepla]

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

[jenkmeister]

There are tools like this (code profilers) but you would need access to the source code for the data to be of any value. That said, we may be able to find a tool that lets you capture the events as a log file that can be sent to us for us to put through the code profiler. I'll chat with the team more to see if we figure something like this out. Definitely would help us as sometimes repro steps don't always reproduce the problem for us. 

[Fresh Squeezed Creative]

We appreciate that your team care enough to feel thiis weight, but that isn't the issue.

We are paying a premium for the privelige of being a gloorified beta tester with your alpha released "Premium" software. Times are tough, and getting tougher.

Adobe is receiving record profits every year while it's users are left paying a premium for bug ridden, crappy software...

Like, what the heck man? You're saying you wear the weight of the users like we should sympathise.
And we do to a degree.

But it's OUR wallets that are hurting, it's OUR deadlines that are pushing, it's OUR JOB SATISFACTION AND ENJOYMENT being bled away due to a shoddy experience. Due to a f****n autosave window popping up every few minutes that kills our flow. Stuff that is so, 2002.
We're paying for this, it's just noot good enough. Especially when almost a decade ago the software was exponentionally faster and better on old tech hardware than it is now. 

We DO appreciate that AE is a amall dev team but in 2023 with record profits, really sorry but it just aint enough...
Take some of your record profiuts and fix the problems. Hire staff, re-write the freaking thing from scratch, other coompanies are able to, why can't Adobe?

Or, do the right thing and give us some compensation on our sub costs for the lost time and increased stress and job dissatisfaction this crap is causing. Money talks.

[Warren Heaton]

@Marc Trzepla 

I find the Composition Profiler to be very helpful for what you're describing "to see where After Effects is getting tied up".

I'm not sure what's different about my configurations, but I do not experience the UI lag that some of the screen recordings posted in this thread show.

-Warren

[Martin Matthias]

@Fresh Squeezed Creative 

Let's keep this discussion constructive. No one forces you to buy Adobe products. If you're unhappy with the software, cancel your subscription. It's a free market.

[Fresh Squeezed Creative]

@Martin Matthias  "Constructive" is subjective, and I respectfully disagree that my comments are not constructive. The side of this discussion that I bring up is eequally as important as the tech side. 

AE has been a total dog's breakfast since 2014. NINE YEARS AGO. Almost a decade.
Yet, Adobe made $4.89bn in Q3 of 2023 alone.

They can absolutely afford to do better, they're absolutely capable of doing better - they are choosing not to. 

[Martin Matthias]

@Fresh Squeezed Creative 

If you followed this thread you know that the Adobe staff is aware of the issues and working on them. Am I disappointed about the slow development pace? Sure. It must be a business decision of the management to not put more manpower into AEs development. I bet the devs working on it are disappointed aswell.

Is it constructive to scream in Caps Lock demanding Adobe to give you money back because their software is not "good enough"? No.

We all know about the performance problems. AE devs know about them. If you have anything to add that could potentially support or speed up the development, that's great! Ranting has happened enough here.

[Fresh Squeezed Creative]

@Martin Matthias - my opinion and comments are no more, or less vvalid, than yours or anybody else's in here.

While you may not agree with my comments, I'll kindly continue to voice what I think is important and appropriate. I don't think it's overly appropriate you have taken it upon yourself to decide what is and isn't relevant.

It's not about ranting, though. It's about hard working creative professionals who are finding it harder and harder to make money efficiently because the software we're paying for continually slips further and further into performance dissarray.

It's about a company touting massive profits at the expense of yours, mine, and everyone else in here's time and wallet. Adobe isn't my friend, Adobe isn't your friend. Adobe is a business that provides a service, and that service is more expensive and less efficient than a decade ago. All on hardware that is exponentially better in every single facet. 

No, I am sorry, but Adobe are taking the piss here mate. I don't know what level of Adobe it is coming from obviously, this isn't pointed at software devs.

Adobe aren't working on this as a priority, it's as obvious as night and day. it's been years!!! The "Make it faster and stop crashing" thing has been around for what seems like ever. Minus 14, God bless it. 

I did also provide constructive feedback. Hire more devs with the literal billions in profit and fox it!

Pretty sure a senior Dev doesn't cost all THAT much...

[scrozier]

Welcome to v24! Another version where Charlie Brown doesn't get to kick the proverbial football. 

Every version I try the same basic test. Duplicate 30 solids, add one position keyframe and try to select all and move the keyframes around and it still lags like its 1993. 

[jenkmeister]

@scrozier I promise when we make improvements to the UI performance, I will post back here. There is work on-going in this area, but some of these changes are deep in shared code used across Adobe, and it is taking a long time to get those changes through all the teams for review and integration. The drawing on the timeline on Windows also affects the drawing of the overlays, so there is quite a bit to test there as well. I do apologize for our lack of outward facing progress here.

[InfiniteWhale]

If this is the case then why do Adobe insist on this ridiculous annual release cycle??  We don't want a new version released arbitrarily ever year that offers no meaningful changes and the same bugs - take two years, take FIVE - just make AE work well!  That's all we want!  For the love of God! 

[scrozier]

@jenkmeister Thanks for responding. I know my post isn't really helpful, but I do have to voice my frustration on the lack of apparent progress from time to time. I think fixing interface responsiveness would be the most meaningful bug fix of the last 10 year, if it can be done well!   

[scrozier]

I've only dreamed of such performance in AE. 

https://youtu.be/vLdq9m93FLI?si=_Sl5NIeRCKK7Q9Ba

[Fresh Squeezed Creative]

Holy smokes, this looks great! Can't wait to try it out.

I really honestly hope, for After Effects sake, this really scares Adobe. It should.

[GoatWar2000]

Also have a look at Nocth.one - broadly similar to unreal (gpu based 3d) but it's much more artist friendly (Unreal is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut sometimes - there's massive unnecessary bloat in there due to it being primarily a game engine, and it doesn't encourage experimentation either because assets are shared across different levels, meaning you can break things elsewhere if you aren't careful) 

Notch is used in a lot of live shows. Because it can handle very high resolutions that basically bring AE to its knees.

Talking of which, with things like the MSG dome in vegas and the al-wasl dome in dubai we are seeing content resolutions that blow way past the hardwired frame buffer size limit of 2gb that's internally hardwired in AE. Presumably in 1998 nobody dreamed it was possible to make a frame use that much ram, but with massive LED walls becoming cheaper and cheaper, here we are. So if any devs read this, you have to do something about that for a start. 

[GoatWar2000]

typo, that should be notch.one. 

Also with 8k televisions becoming a thing, does anyone see those coming and think "OMG, imagine working in AE at 8k and trying to do anything serious"

There will therefore be a point when it's finally no longer possible to work in AE and maybe that's when it will die. A shame as fundamentally I quite like the way it operates, I've used it since 2000 - so I know all the shortcuts, all the tricks and when it works I can work fast with it. But it's dying right now - it will not make it another 5 years like this. 

[Fresh Squeezed Creative]

Thanks for the insight Mr Goatwar. 

While I'm not 23yrs into AE, I am 15, and it's unbelievably sad to see how it is playing out.

I just hope this Unreal prospext really seriously rattles some cages at Adobe.

About damned time (and I say that out of love for AE, mostly). Reality is though we've been circling the performance drain for way way way too long, and somehow I have a sneaking suspicion that there's enough corporate arrogance at Adobe to continue to shrug it off while they sit back and collect all those sweet sweet passive sub $$$

But hey, there's that new feature every release nobody wants, that's something! 

[GoatWar2000]

Arguably the drain circling started more than 15 years ago! Because by then people were expecting 1080p. AE was at its peak when everything was SD@720*576, haha

[edddim]

to make up for it, Adobe just bumped up the subscription price by ca 8,3% / 50 EUR

It IS nice to see that adobe is finally working hard to overcome the historic product silos that existed for decades.

Probably gpt will eat the entire CC in the end. Having AI generate a new photos is already cheaper than paying for PSD to edit existing ones. Let the fray begin.

[scrozier]

I also would say that I'm not really keen on using Unreal, as the learning curve looks pretty steep, but to me this is how a modern graphics app should look and behave in terms of interactivity and rendering speed. They are putting a lot of effort into this new Mercury 3D engine but the GUI and Rendering responsiveness are miles away from where Unreal or even Blender is. When they announced the new 3D engine I was excited and hopeful that they could get something that worked as responsively as unreal but its still the same old juddery mess. There should be no reason that we can't render shape layers in 3D in realtime in 2023. Fix the interface, up the render speed, or its already obsolete. 

[Rob217717683hsl]

I recommend learning DaVinci Resolve/Fusion. Bit of a learning curve but SO much faster. Possibly not all the features of AE yet, but they'll come and I haven't encountered anything I miss yet. I've already cancelled my personal CC subscription.

[Warren Heaton]

While Resolve has some great features, it still doesn't have kerning (maybe we'll finally see it in version 19?), no Text Animators, and it doesn't allow for running multiple versions along side each other.  

[Frank_B]

Adobe 24.2 ridiculously lagging /freezing for split seconds or even couple of seconds. Small projects and compositions. Powerful windows 10 workstation. Lightroom or Photoshop don't have this issue. After Effects team, please resolve this issue.

[jenkmeister]

@Frank_B Can you capture a video of what you're seeing? There are multiple areas in this thread that are either improved or not improved at all. Is this a new issue in the Beta? Are you using 3D objects? Whatever info you have that can help us help you would be appreciated. 

[Groot316]

Experiencing the same issue here. RAM usage immediately jumps to 95% and "Low memory warning" orange bar appears even in simple compositions with one or two 4k video files and no effects. Clearing cache only removes a few GB and does not solve the issue. Memory assigned to other apps is already low. Because of this, the preview in AE 2024 is unusable, but I have to continue working on a project by scrubbing the timeline and estimating without previewing. Unfortunately already started project in AE 2024, which is not forwards compatible with AE 2023.

I agree with other comments regarding "updates" to AE...I would take smoother performance over additional features any and every day.

[Groot316]

Update: Disabled one external plugin (unfortunately a useful one but not worth the hassle of this RAM issue) and did find that that resolved the slow UI issue. Thank you for the pinned reply above.