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

[Ando0o0]

like after effects?

[Warren Heaton]

Well, sort of "like After Effects".

Things to include in troubleshooting:

• CEP panels
• Third-party plugins
• Other applications (anything that uses a lot of RAM)
• Seemingly unrelated system drivers

Please see the pinned reply by jenkmeister for more details.

[jackthegiantslayer]

It's a shame but not surprising that Adobe would prioritize its shareholders over its users. Every time I read yet another article about "Adobe's Record Revenue" it just baffles me to hear that your team is understaffed and underfunded. You might think after all the press After Effects gleaned from "Everything Everywhere All at Once" they might throw their prize software a bone?

To quote your executive vice president and CFO, Dan Durn: “Adobe is better positioned today than we’ve ever been to serve our customers globally.” Are they, Dan? Because I'm not hearing about any new hires to alleviate your already burdened software teams.

[Fresh Squeezed Creative]

How dare Adobe raise my subscription costs after this f****** fiasco.

How f****** dare they.

Bunch of clowns. Whinging about how small your team is whilst touring record profits. Absolutely filthy practice Adobe.

Absolutely f****** filthy.

[Warren Heaton]

@Fresh Squeezed Creative 

I’ve always found it very important for us to be well connected to our creative self-expression – whatever that might be - music, writing, painting, photography, graphic design, motion graphics – you name it.  If we can stay connected to that, we can handle whatever type of crazy things that seem to inevitably and invariably come our way.

If it ever turns out that the multi-verse that the Oscar-winning feature film “Everything Everywhere All At Once” imagines is real, I’m pleased to be in the universe where we have After Effects for motion graphics, the company that publishes it is doing well, and there is an online community more than happy to help figure out why one person’s software isn’t working as expected while someone else's is.

How about we try to get After Effects working at least as well for you as it obviously was for six artists working from home to create hundreds of impressive visual effects for a crazy sci-fi adv...?

Let’s start here: How do I write a bug report?  Kindly post those details for us to get started.  It could be here or in a new thread.  And a reminder:  A little courtesy goes a long way in these forums.

- Warren

[Roberto Tafuro]

I have posted a thread probably related to all this terribles issues with UI and slow response. I've had no reply yet. Here is the post.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-bugs/ae-2023-2-1-3d-is-unusable/idi-p/13657828

I can't format my PC, too many works to do, so i have to buy another SSD and try to install everything in a new fresh HD. This is the last thing i can try. Really,really frustrated.

[edddim]

I am setting up a stupidly simple agenda screen. maybe 5 layers and 10 keyframes. Nothing PPT could not do. Started off ok but the UI ground to a halt, 5 sec lag even selecting layers.

One would think Ryzen 9, 64gb 3600, 2070super should be enough to animate text.

checked version, studio driver, settings, other system performance, etc, all fine and up to date.

Based on the underrated comment below from @GregJacobsArt I changed font from "INTER" to Arial and bang, AE snappy again. changed it back and thud, lead feet.

But why would AE support the type Adobe distributes, right?

Kafkaesque.

EDIT: bug occurs when font styles are mixed within one text box. Alternating regular and bold? bad idea.

[edddim]

Started with cache size 0 bites today.  standard UI settings

@duh2boy: don't troll. this 'dumb kid' started with indd v 2.0.

EDIT removing all scripts and restarting brought no improvement.

[Lasse Gjertsen]

@uh2boy28985968857g 

bruh u dom dom boi lern ho 2 friggn writ b4 dizzin lol

[jenkmeister]

@edddim there are definitely some slow downs and issues with fonts that we are aware of. We have been working on a rewrite of AE's font engine for a few months now and expect to put those changes into Beta in a few weeks from now to get some broader testing. Hopefully that'll improve the experience. If not, we'll try to repro the bold/non-bold scenario and see what we can find is going on.

[edddim]

Thanks for your direct and honest feedback.

I'm happy to provide the file or any other information, if it is
helpful. I'll test the beta, even.

Otherwise, I feel compelled to express my lack of of understanding for
the deficits in something so elemental.

Not everyone needs explosions.


mit freundlichen Grüßen

(personal information removed)

[nubnubbud]

@scrozier 
I can tell you exactly how blender does its UI for those things!
it's pure openGL! that's it, no fancy stuff, just raw draw calls updating whenever something that might make them update happens. I believe they also differentiate between variable changes and continuous input, like the change of an opacity value will not update till the user finishes changing the value, while the playhead and keyframes being dragged will continuously update the result.

from what I can tell, Adobe's UI should be similar, making it more mysterious why it's so laggy. I can only assume the backend somewhere causes it to wait for something, or kick off processes it shouldn't.

[scrozier]

@nubnubbud 

Most software I use these days has figured out how to get their GUI code running smoothly on the GPU. Just look at phone apps? No one would use an iPhone if it studdered as badly as an Adobe app, it would be ripped to shreds in the tech press for being laggy. This is considered baseline performace now, and its a long overdue upgrade. Even Adobe Illustrator (by far not my favorite app but I use it when I have to) can scale and update vectors in realtime on the GPU at 60fps. I would say its interface runs pretty well. So it can be done, I'm just not sure what the holdup is with AE, most signs point to ancient codebase from the late 1990s when people were running VooDoo FX cards. 

[nubnubbud]

I think that's likely the source of the issue
it's not that they can't get it running on GPU, but they won't.
AE is over 30 years old now. It existed before discrete GPU's and multi-core CPU's, and never had any code to work with one until about 2012, and that code is still a buggy hack that reduces reliability and actually results in often worse performance, because the code simply isn't meant for paralellization at all.

So... now we're here. at a place we wanted to avoid, because, as it turns out, in all the updates, we only ever got features, and we never got a refactor. We never got a true optimization pass, and we never got the maintainence due, from a multi-billion yearly revenue company. Of course, there's a reason for that. 

It's Adobe's business model.

since 2011, Adobe has not been a software development company. They have not developed anything beyond what a solo developer could, even once. their new business model is Autodesk's. buy out the competition, sail on their work with a subscription model, and run it into the ground, call addons "updates"(ever wonder why AE alone has over 450 base addons?) to prolong investment gains rinse and repeat. look at figma, and substance, and mixamo, and aviary, and frame.io! They buy, then let die.
and previous adobe products are not spared this erosion. After all, They didn't develop these programs, and they've given us no real assurance that they even know how. Why would we ever expect them to rewrite a dying program, just so it could compete fairly, when they could just buy the competition using one year of our cash, hard-earned by using their programs?

Adobe, from what I have seen, is no longer capable of developing or updating programs. they develop addons, and lie that it's an update, before overcharging to fund "expensive development" so efficient that it takes 5 years to remove and add h.264 support (a standard output library), and 7 years to copy a one core render process to a second core(after having introduced it in a more performant way in 2011).

[Warren Heaton]

@nubnubbud 

Surely you've noticed that we can make edits while the preview is running?  Or that we can watch the preview run in a downstream Comp while making edits in a upstream Comp?  

I've found that to be extremely helpful for broadcast 2160p work that needs to be deliverd on a tight deadline.

[nubnubbud]

@Warren Heaton 
I've noticed that functionality is terrible, and works poorly for obvious reasons (if edits are slow normally, why would making them while rendering multiple frames while adjusting already taxed and buggy UI be any better?)

I don't even know what downstream or upstream has to do with any of this- It doesn't matter how many comps deep I go, nesting comps has NEVER increased usability.

I've also noticed we've been over this before, and that time too, you sung praises about editing while using playback, for some reason- a canned response?
you've never had any performance issues and the program works perfectly and there's never been a reason for you to compare it with anything else so you'll just sing its praises all day every day. I'm actually providing criticism here because I've had terrible experiences with this program over the course of over a decade, meanwhile you continually misrepresent issues to maintain an air of superiority.

I'm not talking about upstream or downstream editing, I'm not talking about editing while using playback. I'm talking about the UI not acting in a performant manner. the public answer from Adobe is "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" 
but it's important to note that they aren't recognizing that many users do not use 3rd party addons, and that many of the 450+ official addons do interact with the UI, too, including several in the tracking workflow, mograph, and corrective effects, meaning it affects nearly every field of work.

so shush and let people criticize a company that charges broke college students a fee for the honor of cancelling recurring fees for not even using that money to keep their service competitive, then sell that service as a product that you can't own.
They live in your head rent free, warren. you buy their product, but you don't own it. Adobe takes from you, and gives you nothing and you love it because without this thing they graciously allow you to use, you couldn't even do that work.

[Warren Heaton]

Sounds like we're back to needing to troubleshoot someone's workstation.

[nubnubbud]

@Warren Heaton 
looks like we're back to a condescending "community expert" insisting that a program not being able to display UI at 24fps on hundreds of different modern workstation to laptop configurations, means they're all defective-
but not his, oh no- heaven forbid there's something about his live broadcast setup that differs from a heavy VFX setup.

on every computer I've used, from laptops, to mac pros, to gaming desktops, to workstations, it's only ever been tolerable at best. Adobe products run like snails over a bed of salt, and I'm probably inadvertently insulting snails by saying that. Resolve works fine on 3 of them, windows movie maker worked on 3 of them, and blender edited video just fine on every single one. but you put that video in an adobe timeline? Nah, your computer sucks now.

The only time I've been able to consistently get a fast playback on 2k+ video was before CS6.

[scrozier]

Warren I would say it's time to take off the troubleshooting hat. I would also love to send you some of my project files and have you screen record your interface running at 60fps and then disect your computer for whatever arcane knowledge you've applied to get it to run perfectly. 

This is an Adobe issue, and one that has existed for as long as I've used AE. The UI bogs down any time you add over 10 layers of keyframes etc. At times, I feel that Adobe doesn't really know how its users use its product, because its up to you to send your project files for them to stress test. The bugs I find are fundemental and never attached to some configurartion issue that I'm aware of. I'm always puzzled why it seems like they are not seeing the same thing that I am seeing, becuase you run into it after using the program for more than 20 minutes. 

Additionally, @jenkmeister has acknowledged in part here and other threads that the UI code is ancient and needs a major re-write. What I find frustrating as a paying customer is that we can't get a commitment from anyone at Adobe that this will ever happen. It's always "under review" "were looking into it" we never hear, "this is our top priority" or "here is some baseline transparancy on how we plan to rectify this issue." It can feel at times like Adobe is stalling for time because they legitimately don't know how to solve the problem becasue the person who wrote the interface code in 1993 retired in 2009 and can't be reached. 

@Marc Trzepla made this request I think back in 2018 on User Voice and I was told a "senior developer" was looking into it then and then literally nothing happened while UI performance actually decreased. (see layer transforms bug etc). Nothing erodes trust more than having the issue acknowledged and then ignored for FIVE YEARS and then basically being gaslit about it. 

I've tried to be more constructive and positive on these forums and will gladly jump in and send project files etc if it means we can move the needle to some modern software code, but I am starting to feel like @nubnubbud where its just not in Adobe's business model anymore to develop software, as absurd as that sounds. When you hear that AEs team is small that does not instill confidence that Adobe is invested in making the best software they can. It sounds like they are letting AE scrape by with the bare minimum while paying out investors with all our subscription money. And this isn't even limited to AE. Photoshop is also creaking under the weight of an ancient single threaded codebase. I don't use it as much anymore but it was always a laugh at how slow filters still run on a single core. 

Adobe is from what I hear, a famously a great place to work as far as company culture and benefits go. I do think the employees want to take pride in their work and deliver a competent product to their users, but without any transparancy into how these products are developed or what the engineering team priorities truly are, the end users are left to speculate on why it takes 5 years to even get basic functionaly moving in the right direction. I will continue to make noise here until a viable competitor takes the AE mo-graph throne down, but until that day...

[Roberto Tafuro]

Hello to all. I've experienced terrible performance in AE2023. Ae 2022 works as expected, while 2023 turns out as a nightmare, unusable. Well, here is my discover, i'll post here my reply in this thread https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-bugs/ae-2023-2-1-3d-is-unusable/idc-p/13665866#M2992

(This mobo settings are there from the beginning, and affect only AE2023 performance)

Hello to all. I have an update, probably other people may have the same issue and are just looking in the wrong direction. I've formatted the PC and then i've reset the Bios to the default settings. It seems that the Optimization tool of Asus was running in background. Now the program is 200% faster and doesn't mean if you have hardware acceleration on and gradients on. So, probably the terrible performance of other AE may be related to Bios settings. I think that is in any Asus motherboard with the new Bios.

NOTE: AE 2022 WORKS AS EXPECTED WITH THE OPTIMAL TURNED ON. IT'S ONLY AE 2023 RELATED.

Hope this diecover may help other people in troubles.

https://youtu.be/M_o81UGqjFI

[nubnubbud]

@Warren Heaton @scrozier 

https://imgur.com/a/jP6OPa8 
let's just say, I wouldn't be complaining here if it was in a "usable" state. 
I was only on uservoice originally, but then they decided critical bugs and program-breaking errors didn't warrant a direct line to the devs. Enjoy no more crowdsourced bugchecking, idiots. (I'm still salty about having a bunch of my posts deleted for not being in the top 2.85% in popularity I made those so your devs would know what errors were occuring when.)
that I paid $600 a year to be treated like dirt is pretty much a scam, except even scammers have the decency to pretend you're getting a good deal, I've gotten my fees reduced twice, because I was being overcharged by a team that didn't think I'd have the guts to speak up- there have been no performance improvements or updates that didn't add something significant that already used to exist in a previous version, let alone the price scheme is a hard upsell because the 3 apps video editors need come in at more than the entire suite, and every. one. is. cumbling, ancient nonsense.

Don't get me wrong- I started in CS3- I know what the programs are like, and what they used to be like. You might be able to say "this is industry standard" to a college kid getting their first programs, but I had the experience of owning them, they were mine, and they worked well, and they didn't need updates once. It's an unspoken truth that pirating protection was soft in the beginning to allow a wider audience to get hooked on it. Now you have a huge collection of editors who know for a fact that the still available pirated 2008 software was vastly superior to a suite that will run you thousands over a couple years.

The programs are now filled with little gimmicks that mean nothing, while things like clicking the play button on a video, and zooming in are buggy and barely functional. I'm convinced that it's all the dev teams can do, and at some point, I just wish they'd... stop. it would be painful. for everyone. but maybe then, someone up top would notice that something is wrong.

These poor dev teams. I feel for them. they watch the company looming over them suck up billions in revenue, while they, in relaive comfort I hear, are not given a team sufficient to even maintain a software, let alone write the new one we need. They serve a purpose of providing essential life support to adobe, but are given no medicine to even ease the behemoth's pain as those at the top ride it into the ground.

if CS6 was made available again, and all updates were halted as the team made a new After Effects using what they've learned from this one, but with modern hardware and code at its base... I think it would be wonderfully successful.
but that won't happen because
adobe's programs aren't even legal half the time 
and covers up lawsuits by passing the costs onto their clients 
and delete the files they're afraid of being exposed for 
and threaten their users for remaining loyal instead of switching 
and refuse to provide reliable long term support, so they can bury their tracks every fiscal year. 

and you guys still owe me 2 seats of Adobe CS6 that you deleted from my account or the $1040 that's worth.

[jenkmeister]

Well that's a lot of posts for a weekend. 😊

A few responses:

* The AE team are on these forums, responding as we can. We moved off uservoice over to the forums to be able to do a better job of engaging with our community. Hopefully that's being felt. Sorry if we didn't move everything over, if you have specific things for us to look at, please let us know. 

* We are definitely working on the UI. A new release of AE is coming out very soon and we have incorporated the UI fixes that have been in Beta of late. If you're on Windows, the timeline should be more performant. We haven't solved every case, but we are actively working on it. MacOS timeline has some decent perf (90fps on my Mac arm system) but we will keep pushing on both Win and Mac. 
* While we can't officially talk about future work, please hear me when I say we are taking the UI design, usability and performance as a very high priority. 
* The majority of features we've worked on the past 2-3 years are a direct result of feedback from the community. We've had to take them in some order, and I know it's not fast enough, but we are systematically working through the backlog. Yes, 30 year old code can be slow to update, but we are updating it, focusing on rewriting pieces, trying to make AE more stable and make AE what our community needs it to be.  

Keep letting us know what doesn't work and we'll keep you updated as we make progress. 

Thanks,

Sean

Group Engineering Manager for AE

[Blending 5FD0]

I've been a Motion Designer for about 8 years and have been following this thread, though I haven't interacted with it yet.

I agree with a lot of things reported here, mainly with the fact that AE has never been so slow and painful to work with...

It's been one of my main work tools for years, but as I always say to my co-workers, what keeps me enduring this suffering that has been working with After Effects is basically the connectivity with other creative programs (PS, Oh, AU...), it's more of a necessity than an option, because if there was another tool that would supply my workflow, I would probably migrate, even if I had to relearn some steps...

The main problem I see in After Effects is the poor hardware utilization, it's really really bad... the render engine urgently needs to be rewritten and I always keep thinking to myself "They must have a team that is working on rewriting the program while they release palliative updates, it's not possible they aren't...", and from the bottom of my heart, I really hope you are doing this.

I believe that a lot of After Effects programming comes from the beginning, where times were different, the hardware worked differently and the impression it gives is that the team has always focused on adding features and not on updating the code during the evolution of the computational power.

After Effects has a greater focus on 2D animations, however the rendering is much more difficult than in any 3D software, much more difficult indeed...

Whereas I rendered a relatively complex 2-minute 3D animation in 1 hour in Octane, a 2D animation I rendered took 15 hours in After Effects, simply because they had a few cameras and motion blur...

And I can say that this is a hardware optimization bug, because when I'm really in a hurry and I need to render during the day, I keep rendering the video in micro pieces directly in After Effects, that is: I put the video to render, let render for about 3 minutes, I stop the render, place it again, stop the render, and so on until the rendering finishes...

Why do I do this?

Simply because the render starts fast and soon afterwards becomes extremely slow due to lack of hardware utilization.

The video that took 15 hours to render, I can render in about 40 minutes doing this process....

Lately I've only been putting the videos to render at dawn and no render has taken less than 10 hours, and I've already tested many processes and revisited my workflow...

Another point: expressions are something extremely interesting that After Effects makes it possible to use to make projects responsive, so I spent some time studying and learning some things, but after all I saw that it ends up being something practically unusable because it makes projects very heavy... here comes the question: what's the use of having super interesting features when it's practically impossible to use them because the software crashes all the time?

I hope the team understands and takes this post as constructive criticism, I know the development team works hard and a lot depends on the highest levels of the company, so I really hope this post gets where it needs to go, because every day I I'm considering abandoning 2D animation in After Effects, and I believe that many professional colleagues have the same vision... many of us really like After Effects and spend a lot of time evolving our skills in it, so it's very sad to reach a point where the profession is being extremely stressful because of the work tool, this should not even be the most stressful point, it should be a facilitator.

Please review the code in general, I know this is not simple at all and takes a lot of money and time, but you are Adobe, and eventually you need to start this.

By doing this, you will certainly have the gratitude of many professionals from all over the world and from different industries.

Out of curiosity, my current hardware is:
Processor: Ryzen 7 5950x
GPU: RTX 4080 16GB
Ram: 64GB 3200mhz
SSD: FURY RENEGADE 4TB
Windows 11 Pro

[nubnubbud]

@jenkmeister 
I know, I've heard all that, and I firmly believe that. However, I also firmly believe you guys aren't in a position to make overarching business plan decisions that would make the lives of devs and users easier in the long run. Know I don't hold the dev teams in contention. It's the business, investment, and leadership I consider cowardly and very much untrustworthy. They have personally lied to me a number of times, tried to defraud me as a customer, mistreat their community teams by throwing them under the bus for poor decisions, and waste the dev teams' efforts by understaffing and using valuable talent as nothing more than a way to extend the life of products they acquired by buying out the competition.

also, the program has at least... not broken down as fast in the last few years as it did post-2015! That said, everything between 2012 and 2021 was... atrocious. Rendering performance alone dropped by a quarter, not counting UI performance and the removal of industry standard codecs, removing multithreaded output, reintroducing it- RAM preview shouldn't even exist in the way it does- I designed my system so that its RAM can be filled twice in under 3 seconds, so I find it odd that having my project on an SSD or so on can't speed it up- but then I go back to my resource manager, and AE is still just throwing most everything through a single thread- half a core, effectively.

Our operating systems just don't use hardware the same any more. no longer do we have the entire CPU working on some primary process- you might as well be using after effects on a windows xp virtual machine, with how compatible it is. 

The people up top need to be made aware that After Effects is not properly supported by modern hardware, and that no amount of patches or addons will help the fact that the core of the program, its beating heart, would cost so much dev time and talent to update, if anyone even can any more, that it would be more financially responsible to simultaneously sunset after effects (while still keeping it available for compatibility and legacy reasons) and begin work on its replacement. 

I would say the same for photoshop, but Adobe didn't develop photoshop. it's a miracle it still outputs an image, much like AE, given how it's barely been adjusted since 1999. Painting with it is totally unusable now so everyone uses krita or sai

[Rob5FE3]

Personally don't run any scripts or plugins and it's still a laggy mess. Especially typing in a text box. Characters don't register/render/go missing. And yep I've checked all the fonts. Happens with default system fonts, or any font really. On both my Macbook Pro (16" i9), iMac (27" i7) and Windows machine (13700k, RTX2080Ti)