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

[Groot316]

Update part 2: While performance is better, the issue is actually not fully resolved. RAM usage still is used much more quickly than in AE 2023, and very frequent (every 1-5 minutes) clearing of cache is needed for preview to work.

[Fresh Squeezed Creative]

Hey Everyone,

Today I contacted adobe billing with my gripes about After Effects performance vs subscription costs. I basically told tem how long I have been using the software and that I am very dissatisfied with the performance of recent years, how much additional time things are taking, etc - and was given a recent promotional discount.
Basically halving my subscription.

I suggest you all do the same.

If enough of us do this, well, perhaps speaking with our wallets is a better idea than trying to flog a dead horse here in the forums.

[InfiniteWhale]

I did this, but I wasn't trying to get money off - I was genuinely prepared to fully cancel Adobe CC.  I've been paying for the full package for so long, and I just don't consider it worth it anymore.  The only app that isn't easily replaced is After Effects, which IMO is the most badly maintained app they offer

[Fresh Squeezed Creative]

Totally. In the same boat man. 

It's just sad it has to be like this. 

This is the downside of subscription models. Sadly, the consumer loses over corporate profits. They rake in monthly with no accountability.

Possibly, the developers care. I don't know. As a consumer, 15yr user, it doesn't feel like there's much care from developers beyond the scripted forum answers. That's just an observation though. 

I wholeheartedly believe Adobe acquired all of this software over the years with buying power, and is actually incapable of servicing it adequately. It sure appears that way. 

I'd love to be proven wrong though, sometime this millennia. 

[scrozier]

I have nothing good to say other than please fix this in 2024 for the love of Pete. 

[Marc Trzepla]

@jenkmeister 

Just checking in, asking for an update on how remedying the slow interface interaction is going.

On a whim the other day I nuked everything from Adobe off my computer using the Cleaner tools for a clean slate.  I’d assumed that maybe v23.x.x’s interface was actually now faster but I simply wasn’t experiencing it because of legacy preferences, settings, or 3rd party plugins gumming up the works. I keep doing this - believing the problem is with me.

Sadly, after a fresh install of After Effects (and lots of workspace re-dos across every Adobe program), nothing improved.   Basic vanilla AE, right out of the box, straight from the installer, and it was Laggy McJanky from the get-go.

Don’t know where you’re at on the globe, but if you want me to stop by Adobe offices in NYC to show y’all why I cry myself to sleep, you just let me know when.

Thanks,

[scrozier]

Maybe this year/decade! 

[jenkmeister]

@Marc Trzepla The team is primarily based in Seattle, but we do have one of our team in NYC who is one of the team working on our UI updates - I'll see if he can connect with you for getting more details.

More official updates should be coming soon, but we have identified for Windows a major pain point on HiDPI displays that have improved things significantly in our early internal testing. There are additional issues we are still working through with the Layer Controls when they are shown. There are certainly other issues we are looking at as well. 

All that said, UI performance and experience is something we are prioritizing getting really improved this year. I know it's been a long road of waiting, sorry for that, and thank you for your patience. 

[֑nubnubbud]

I just realized. We are now closer to the launch of subscription model than the subscription model launch was to Y2K! and 2012 was also the end of the mayan calender. Proof the end times (for After Effects) are coming, I'm sure.

I think this will remain unresolved, and I would say "till Adobe makes a new After Effects", but they seem unwilling to write code or develop software of their own, despite billions in profits over multiple years. I even told them in 2018 that they needed to, STAT... and they actually responded!... to say they didn't care and to publicly mock people who agreed with me, after which uservoice was shut down... then covid rolled around, everyone got CC and... realized it didn't work, and the only alternatives were davinci and nuke... which are freely available, and resolve has a permanent lisence. so those got bigger.

Ironically, a huge part of the userbase is once again indie and small team... but the pricing is business, and the functionality pales compared to free offerings. I can even get a decent 1080P youtube video from a free version of Nuke, and Davinci resolve has a mini-nuke beuilt into its premiere-like editor, and world class color grading software.

AE is becoming vestigial, with its 2 hour renders and its 6FPS playback and its 2 seconds of cache and... it's odd how it was better than that on a high school library computer in 2011.

[InfiniteWhale]

Oh damn! I was planning on doing this, buy I guess I won't bother. 

[marco san]

@jenkmeister good to hear that you are working hard to fix the laggy UI. Sometime AE is unusable, really difficult to work with. I just swithed from a nvidia gtx 1060 to a rtx 4070 super, and I espected the UI to be more responsive, but it looks like it is even worse than before.
I hope the fixes will get AE UI as responsive as it was in CS6 version, because it feels super heavy, also on very powerful machines.

Cheers

[֑nubnubbud]

well, that's to be expected, from what I can tell, the GPU isn't used to render the UI. if it is... well, I don't think it's coded in a way that can take advantage of a stronger GPU. 

[֑nubnubbud]

Read- 14 billion in revenue, 4.whatever billion in net profits. It's honestly uncomfortable to call them a small team, when the subscription handling and marketing teams are many times larger. There will be nothing to market or subscribe to if these devs continue to work on an endless pile of mini features tacked onto a fundamentally obsolete bavkend

[scrozier]

24.4.0 Beta. New version number....same repeatable jank. Please give us......something. 

[jenkmeister]

@scrozier Very soon. 

[Roberto Tafuro]

They have to change the name in "After Effects, if you want to work have to wait autosave and remember to purge cache every 20 minutes or you can't work anymore".

No words, really

[Paul5E1C]

Meanwhile, you have added awful clunky 3D controls, there was nothing wrong with what we had before, "full" 3D integration, yeah everyone who needed that already has Element 3D because you neglected it for so long, properties panel - again most people already have something better from a 3rd party, and a few pointless AI toys that nobody uses because they don't really work very well outside of your examples. It's almost like the people who use it on a daily basis are being ignored while you add a load of features that nobody asked for just so you have something to market to new customers. Just make it work like it did 10 years ago, please. RAM previews don't work like they should/used to, UI is laggy all the time despite having a monster PC, and crashes at least 4 times a day. I did not have a monster PC 10 years ago but After Effects worked waaaaaaay better in just about every way (and it was still a buggy mess back then). As soon as there is a viable alternative Adobe are being ditched entirely.  

[jenkmeister]

@scrozier A few minutes ago we posted 24.4x20 of the AE Beta. In that is a set of fixes around UI performance on Windows. This should speed up the interaction of the UI in the timeline and in the comp panel. I'd love to know if you see any improvements. More information about the changes (including the adoption of a updated look including a light mode) is available here: https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-beta-discussions/feature-focus-new-after-effects-spectr... 

And no, this is not the end of the road. We know there are many things still to improve (overlay rendering speed, the 3D gizmo rendering speed, more work on the UI overall), but hopefully this is a start.

[scrozier]

@jenkmeister Haven't had too much time too look into it yet but initially the basic OP problem of box selecting keframes seems to be dramatically improved! THANK YOU! Honestly wasn't sure this day would ever come, but this makes me very happy for my quality of life going forward! Will do more testing tomorrow!

[marco san]

Hi there @jenkmeister 

As I reported in the feature post, I just tried AE beta 24.4.20. finally the timeline panel lagging is almost gone, but, 3D gizmos lagging is really really really bad, as I show here.
https://youtu.be/aqfmHvd3D4Y
It's unusable! Please fix it. It's impossible to work with 3D layers. I reported the issue 2 years ago. It doesn't make sense to add 3D features if the 3D UI doesn't work. I'm on Ryzen 2700x, 32GB ram, Rtx 4070 super.
Cheers

[Carlos Zenzuke Albarran]

Ok, the really really bad keyframe problems are mostly gone, thank god for that (even though it's progressively slower the more keyframes you select when that shouldn't be a problem at all), but this, being as it seems a rewrite or refresh of the UI system is REALLY underwhelming seeing it's maybe back to being as good as it was ten years ago, not BETTER and definitely not SMOOTH. Also, the darkest option is too dark and the middle one is too bright, so it's very ugly to my eyes now.

[jenkmeister]

@Carlos Zenzuke Albarran I suspect the "more keyframes, the slower it gets", is related to the layer overlay drawing which is one of the things still on the list to improve. 

@marco san Thanks for the feedback. Similar to @Carlos Zenzuke Albarran, the overlay drawing is still being worked on to speed up. The 3D gizmo is also high on the list to a) speed up the rendering of and b) a better experience where you won't see a gizmo for every layer if there are multiple layers selected. 

As I said, we aren't done, just the first step in the journey to getting AE's UI and Comp viewer out of the way and getting you all back to working instead of needing to post on the forums 🙂 

[scrozier]

@jenkmeister 

I get that this is early days on this re-code of the interface but was hoping for a little bit more of a FPS boost than what I'm seeing currently. 

Hoping this is cleared up with the aforementioned layer controls bug but I was getting pretty bad dropped frames even with those turned off. Video attached of my test. 

TL;DR. Still drawing keyframe icons at about 7FPS when the goal should be at least 30-60FPS.

I spent a little bit more time with the beta today and did my standard AE "tortue test" of trying to move around 50 keyframes on solids with no animations. In my opinion this should be no issue but AE struggles with moving keyframes around still and that drives me mad. I concur with Carlos that the general snapiness is much improved but once you move into heavier numbers of keyframes it still lags pretty heavily. 

Test setup.

1920x1080 24FPS comp

100 Solid Layers

Position keyframe placed all on the same frame (alt+shift+p)

Select first 50 keyframes.

Drag them about while recording with OBS. 

Count number of frames until keyframes jump to next position and determine keyframe draw FPS.

No animation should have to be recalculated and the "frame render time is at 6ms" or 166FPS. 

AE 24.2.1. (current stable) - no better than 6FPS

AE 24.4.0 (current beta) no better than 8FPS

As a comparison I selected a bunch of animation free keyframes in blender and dragged them about and it had no issue drawing the position of the keyframes on every frame. Not an apples to apples comparison obviosuly, but still think there is far too much jank in the timeline. 

The goal should be to draw the keyframes or other timeline elements (including window resizing, other aspects of the interface) at 60FPS. Even 30FPS would be game changing, currently still dealing with 6-7FPS on fairly simple edge cases. 

[marco san]

Hi @jenkmeister

Thanks, I really appreciate the quick response. Let's hope you will be able to fix it soon!

[jenkmeister]

Thanks for the feedback @scrozier and the videos as well. I think that delay you're seeing is still then related to the drawing of the overlay/layer controls which is still being worked on. Could you try turning those off and run the same tests and see what FPS you're able to get?