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

[scrozier]

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. 

[marklowe]

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.

[Warren Heaton]

@marklowe 

It sounds like your issue may not be specific to After Effects and Photoshop.

Which graphics card(s) do you have in the Mac Pro?  Are the graphics drivers included with macOS or do they need to be installed separately?  Installing an older version of AE and PS and/or the public betas along side the version that you are having an issue with, do the applications have the same unexpected behavior?  

If you connect an FHD display instead, is there any difference?  However, assuming this is a 2019 Mac Pro, it should support up to  one 6K display with the base configuration (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210228).

I do the bulk of my work on a 2019 Mac Pro and After Effects and Photoshop 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 all run really well under macOS 11.7 (although Photoshop displays a message that that's the lowest OS version for 2023 so I will have to upgrade to macOS 12 or 13 soon).  

[marklowe]

Standard MacOS drivers. If I connect two 2560x1600 monitors back, everything runs normal (normal means that I feel Adobe UI is 10% slower then other app, but I can live with it). Another thing: if I run Silhouette standalone, it works fine. If I run it as a AE plugin, it is laggy as hell (AE is open in the background). So please, don't tell me it is not Adobe. I am not the only one here with similar problems.

[SebbieJ]

@Warren Heaton 

"'Use the numerous options After Effects provides to make it more responsive.'  Like what, exactly?"

• Composition Resolution
• Layer Quality
• Skip Frames
• Set Proxy
• Render Time Pane

Also, make sure you're using optimized source footage while working at a Project Color Depth that's appropriate for your output.  For example, use formats that decompress quickly at frame rates and frame sizes that are close to or a good match for your output frame rate and frame size and - very importnatly - don't work at 16 bits-per-channel or 32 bits-per-channel if your rendering or exporting content for YouTube.

Thanks for the tips. I shouldn't regularly, on simple comps (sometimes just containing some shape layers or text, have keyframes and layers stick to my mouse all day because the interface can't keep up with my mouse interaction, or have to wait 3-5 seconds for it to register that I've clicked, selected, or moved something, let alone just when I let go of the mouse button. I'm not sure why you're being the voice of Adobe here. Adobe developers should chirp up and listen and acknowledge their users, they are all fed up of the laggy interface, and they can't deny 104 messages in their forum.

[Warren Heaton]

@SebbieJ 

Yes, you should not have keyframes and layers stick to your mouse or have to wait 3-5 seconds for it to register that you have clicked, selected, or moved something.

When troubleshooting unexpected behaviors I've always found it helpful to compare a workstation that's not having the issue with the one that is.  For example, there was a Mac OS 8 fax extension that caused all source footage to show as 0-by-0 in After Effects 3.1.  Comparing startup items on a similar Mac that was showing source footage as expected allowed for quickly determining that the fax extension was the cause.  Of course, a lot of us don't have more than one workstation on hand and even if we do they're likely to be configured the same way.  That's why it is so helpful to follow the Adobe Support Community How-To Guide and provide the Adobe product and version number, operating system and version number, and computer hardware information.  In the case of After Effects, it's also worth listing any third-party add-ons as those are the most likely cause of sluggish performance with the user interface after the graphics driver.

[Warren Heaton]

@marklowe 

BorisFX publishes some fantastic plugins.  If you participate in the BorisFX support forums, I'd look for responses from Mary Poplin, Mocha Product Specialist.  (Edit:  I just learned that Mary's now with Adobe as part of the FrameIO team - but still look for her responses when in the BorisFX forums.)

This performance tip from Mocha Product Manager Martin Brennand applies to not only Mocha and Silhouette but any After Effects plugin that has a custom user interface: Quick Tip: Faster Playback in After Effects 2022

[scrozier]

At this lage stage of development for this product I think most users are tired of workarounds and gotchas! After Effects interface is less responsive than other other software, full stop. Just to name a few: Blender, Apple motion, don't exhibit these types of interface meltdowns at that AE often does when you start building a complicated project.  

I can literally recreate dropped interface frames and jank in about 30s in After Effects If I add more than maybe 3 keyframes  each to a layer stack of 30 solids. Maybe thats more complicated than the use case of some users who are just building the simplest titles, but for people who are doing minutes long animations its not uncommon to have 50+ layers in a comp with hundreds of keyframes and having AE regularly lag 2-4 seconds when trying to adjust timing is deeply aggrivating. The lag behind the mouse pointer when moving keyframes around is real.

Animation is all about timing and not being able to adjust this fundemental aspect reliably is a huge letdown. 

Its not a driver or computer issue. Obviosuly, if you are running a low end machine you are going to run into more issues, but even on extremely equipped workstations this is still happening. Every other piece of non-adobe animation software I use can manage to select 50 keframes without having a heart attack. Even Premiere's keyframes update way faster than AEs if you select and move those in the effects controls.  

https://twitter.com/TaylorJonpeters/status/1623778202241085440 

Example of lag!!!!

@Victoria Nece @jenkmeister Would love to see a response to this thread and if there is any hope of getting AEs interface back on track. I think I've seen mentioned before that the interface is one of the oldest parts of AE and would need a significant re-write but I think most users would benefit from some investment in this area. 

[jenkmeister]

A couple of things:

* When we've investigated keyframe or UI lagging, the primary cause has been found to be 3rd-party script panels or plugins that are also trying to interact with the UI causing these delays. From the twitter thread I can only see a few layers but not a full view of AE to know if this is a default install or if there are other things in play here. If you've got projects that demonstrate the UI lagging, please pass them along and we'll happily look at them. 

* In terms of a UI rewrite, the team is currently assessing the feasibility of that. Yep, the UI framework in some parts is very, very old, so we'd love to get it updated. It's no small undertaking and would likely stop development on just about everything else in AE (we aren't a very big team) so like everything in software, we need to trade off doing that vs. everything else users are asking for. But like I said, we are actively assessing what it'll take. 

[rubenskv]

". I'm not sure why you're being the voice of Adobe here. "

Yep, I agree. We're not talking about render, or previews, or user old hardware.. It 's an UI problem.

Again:

Ok, my last post is a bit too hopeful. The problem is still huge.  V22 is a bit faster than v.23. The problem is evident on selecting multiple keyframes and so on. But in v.23 it only took 1 layer 1 keyframe selected to lag like hell.

I watch a lot of tutorials, from JakeInMotion, ECAbram, SOM, all the goats have the same HUGE lag UI. So is not a user problem. We all have dealt with it since hi dpi monitors became mainstream (2014). The last drop of water for me was v23. It got worse. I'm sorry, i'm really not the "complaint guy". But this is bad.

I am already looking for other softwares. As soon as I have a more loose project I will use Calvary, or test LeftAngle Autograph.

[rubenskv]

Thank You for addressing this problem honestly, I'm sorry to hear that you have a small team. That must be a challenge.

To me personally the problem occurs on a clean install of AE. No panels, no scripts, no plugins.

If I have to vote on anything related to features, it will be resolving this issue, even if it means a full stop on other innovations.

I mean, what's the point of color keyframes if they behave at 2fps. I'm sorry about the rant, but it's an animation software, dragging and releasing keyframes shouldn't be so slow. Sometimes it looks like I'm trying to guess where the keyframe lands... hold the mouse very steadily,,, and then release the button. Just to find it was missed by 1 frame. Rinse and repeat

.

[scrozier]

@jenkmeister Thank you for responding to this thread! It is currently the "most upvoted" thread on this user forum under bugs! I'm not sure how features are chosen to be worked on but as a user, one would hope the most upvoted request would rank pretty highly on that list! I know its probably more fun to work on flashier product updates but this one has been grinding my gears for quite awhile now. 

As far as creating layer movement jank I can do it on a vanilla install of AE very quickly. It's not a quirk on related to other panels, I use only a very small number of script panels (motion V2, rift, and thats about it) 

I can send you this basic project file. The issue really crops up when you have more than a handful of layers in a composition. I would accept some lag if it was a very, very heavy composition, but we are talking about 80 solids that have no keyframes and take about 0-1ms to render.

Attached is a video of the problem. 

https://youtu.be/B2qIFfjGUB4

Edit : There are more upvoted requests under ideas but I swear this ranked very highly on user voice when that was still around. 

[jenkmeister]

Thanks for the video and for sending me the file. I can reproduce what the video shows. I've sent it along to one of my most senior developers for them to figure out what's going on. Totally agree this isn't acceptable. Will report back as soon as we have more information.

[jenkmeister]

Agreed, this sounds horrible. We are debugging the test project @scrozier sent to me and we'll post back once we have more details. Something has definitely got awry here so we'll figure it out and get it fixed. 

[Martin Matthias]

Thank you Jenkmeister for reaching out to the community!
I'll quickly hop into the discussion to point out a strange UI behaviour that might help you finding issues.
When you select a path, the UI is being rendered much more fluid (not perfect, but acceptable). I have no clue why this could be the case, but maybe your team can figure it out. Maybe then there is a different rendering mode active that could be active all the time to improve performance? Just guessing.

Here is a video of the behaviour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIQYO0ek3U0

If you are aware of this issue, I would really be interested in knowing why it happens. I'm a software developer myself and interested in some of the details leading to this issue. 🙂

[Marc Trzepla]

Curious - how did this go from (2020) “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,” to (2023) “I've sent it along to one of my most senior developers for them to figure out what's going on”? That suggests this is news to the developers.

I was always confident that when I contacted Support or submitted Bug Reports issues would be officially logged and eventually fixed. Reading this thread has me concerned that issues can end up floating away into the ether.

[jenkmeister]

@Marc Trzepla 

I wasn't in charge of AE's engineering in 2020 so I can only respond to what is being reported now the best we can. Our community team raising this to us along with the recent migration from User Voice to the Forums is allowing us to have better insight into the impact of issues.

We also often run into situations where we just can't reproduce what is being reported. When we can get projects that reproduce the issues quickly and easily, then we can go look at them. But often we get vague "this is slow, fix it" posts without the details we need to figure out what's going on. Right now, as I mentioned a few posts up, we do have folks actively looking at the UI, so it's good timing to also look at the reports of laggy performance. 

In terms of past bugs, we triage perhaps 30 reports a week, from all versions of AE and from things in development. Sometimes we just have to say "won't fix", sometimes it is "will fix later when we are working in this area", sometimes it's "we need to fix this now". Apologies if previous issues haven't been fixed for you, we are trying our best to keep up with 30 years of AE code and to get it modernized in as many ways as possible. It's been slow going, but hopefully you've seen updates and improvements the past couple of years that show we are turning the corner. 🤞

[TheFosterHouse]

@scrozier this is the issue in the UI lag that I've been having. What makes it worse is a layer with a lot of key frames showing, like a null with tracking data applied to it or a roto mask from Mocha where it has a key on every frame. It's not just scrolling the time indicator, but also just scrolling up and down the layer stack with the mouse wheel has the same or worse lag.

[jenkmeister]

@Martin Matthias I'm not aware of that one, but we will definitely try to find out what's going on. Any chance you can share that comp with us so we know we are reproducing the right issue? 

[scrozier]

@Martin Matthias @jenkmeister 

I can recreate that quirk as well it is very odd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wui7Hq_FD7c

Steps to create....

1. Add many layers of any type.

2. Try to scrub -- bad timeline lag. 

3. Add shape layer and a path keyframe.

4. Click on a shape path keyframe or outline

5. Try to scrub -- 50-100% improvement in scrubbing performance for no discernable reason! 

6. Click off the shape path keyframe, interface returns to very bad performance. 

I'll send you a project file Sean. 

Side note: even when all the frames are rendered on a comp like this (full green bar) scrubbing performance is still at about 2FPS I think that is also worth mentioning. It doesn't even matter if its a rendered comp if you have a lot of layers you cant scrub!

Final note: If you precomp all your many layers and use collapse transform, scrubbing and performance comes back as AE is back to one layer, (even though in my understanding AE is doing the same amount of render work)  but pre-composing is not always possible or convienient for every job, and sometimes you need to have 50+ layers open. 

[marklowe]

@scrozier I can confirm the same behavior like I see in your video.

I googled a little bit and I learned something. I am not a developer so please, if I write something not correct pls excuse me (same for my english).

I read an article about how operating systems deal with HIDPI interfaces. It is not physically possible that a whole UI is recalculated 60Hz or 72Hz in a second.

So the key is OPTIMALIZATION.

So in an ideal world if you touch a timeline cursor (or a keyframe) and move it, it should initiate and redrawn only really needed UI components plus the preview window. Not the whole UI AE interface.

So I decided the make a test, which solved my problem in a quite silly way, but at least I can use the paint (and clone) tool and scrub the timeline more fluently. (My problem was that I couldn't scrub the timeline fluently even with 1 UHD videotrack).

It somehow proofs the OPTIMALIZATION problem with AE UI.

I just undocked EVERY panel. I mean really EVERY. So I have separate window for project, for the FX, for the timeline, for the preview etc. So ended up with like 6 - 7 separate app windows. Guess what. Now the interface is much faster, I can finally use paint (and clone) and scrub the timeline. If I want to make a window bigger or smaller (draging the corner of the window) I feel it moves fluently. If I reverse everything back (one big window with all panels merged together) and if I try to drag a corner of the window, it feels like draging a big bag of potatos 🙂

In our posthouse we are still on AE2022 22.6 BigSur as I read AE2023 is even worse.

[scrozier]

@marklowe Going to have to see this for myself. 

[jenkmeister]

The panel thing is interesting, we'll have to see if that repros for us internally. Not as a workaround, but to understand what is different. 🙂 

That aside, one thing we have figured out (thanks to @scrozier for his projects) is the drawing of the Layer Controls/Handles is significantly impacting timeline scrubbing and layer/keyframe movement. You can try for yourself by turning off Show Layer Controls from the View Menu. You should find moving the timeline and keyframes is much quicker. So that scenario in particular we are working on fixing right now and hopefully will have something into the beta soon. 

We do still think there is something else that's happened between 23.0 and 23.1 but are still looking for a project that can reproduce the issue (after the layer controls are turned off). If you have projects that fit that description, please let me know. 

[quirky_finder1587]

Same issue, since v23 update, pointer is sticky in the timeline, triming or moving layers have delay. Im on windows 10, Nvidia Studio drivers (because I am using Octane render I cant have game drivers) all up to date. Simply creating a new project and creating a solid produce the lag. It is unprofessional, unacceptable that such bif empire like Adobe do not fix those bugs. We are in 2023 I can't believe it, we should get a refund on our pricey subscription! How can we decently work for clients with this kind of unbelievable problems? DO you happen to test (or use) your software instead of updating every 3 days!?

[scrozier]

@jenkmeister A step in the right direction! I still take the aspirational view that dragging keyframes and layers should be something that can render at 60fps regardless of how big the layer stack panel is or how many layers etc (to a reasonable limit I suppose) . As noted I know this is an old part of the code, and I feel like that goal might require a total re-write, or maybe it just needs to be further unbundled from the viewport render step... either way even with layer controls off its still not "buttery" if that makes sense. Hoping these types of issues help nudge the team towards dedicating some serious resources to bringing AEs interface into the current decade (or 2) in terms of performance!