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

[Rob5FE3]

You know your software sucks when you can't even type in a blank composition using Helvetica or Arial or something super basic without it lagging to the buggery and dropping characters.

[social_Canvas5FEA]

No third party plugins running here, and yet AE is almost the slowest program on my machine, even compared to C4D and Blender. The only software which is slower is Premiere. And this is with a 12 core 13th Gen i7, DDR5 ram and an RTX2080ti

[jenkmeister]

@social_Canvas5FEA Can you be more specific about what is slow? Can you make a screen capture so we can take a look at the issue? 

[jenkmeister]

@Rob5FE3 Can you make a screen recording of what you are seeing? I just tried here on 23.3 typing into a large text box using Arial, and other fonts, and I don't see anything "lagging to the buggery and dropping characters". 

[social_Canvas5FEA]

I've submitted screen recordings in the past on UserVoice. I also submitted a video here:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-bugs/laggy-typing-in-after-effects-is-getting-worse/idc...

Looks like the video is no longer working. I'll capture another one next time I'm working with text in AE.

Basically what happens is often when typing, the last character won't display. It's not until you hit another character that the character appears. This happens over and over. I've experienced this on just about every computer and every version of After Effects I've worked on in the last four years, and my colleagues have experienced this as well.

[jenkmeister]

@social_Canvas5FEA Ok, thank you, that actually helps. I know we've been looking at that recently, I need to check if it's fixed yet. 

[social_Canvas5FEA]

Here you go. First test and I've experienced the issue.

You can see, I type 'LAGGY TYPING IN AFTER EFFECTS".

What I see is 'LAGGY TYPING IN AFTER EFFECT" untill I press another character and the S appears.

If another character isn't typed, then the S never appears.

What you can't see in the video is the pretty terrible input lag between the Keyboard and AE.

LAGGY TYPING IN AE 

[jenkmeister]

@social_Canvas5FEA thanks for sending the video. Just to confirm, that video was from 23.2.1, if not, which AE version. And Mac or Windows, and which version of the OS. Does it ever work properly, or it just doesn't matter, it always happens?

[social_Canvas5FEA]

Yep, After Effects 23.2.1

MacOS Ventura 13.2.1

I'm fairly certain this always happens. I opened an existing document just to capture this footage and it happened straight away, once before I was screen recording and then again straight away.

To me it looks like AE is refreshing the render after each keystroke. Then at the last keystroke, it doesn't update. Hitting another keystroke forces a refresh and the previous character pops up.

[jenkmeister]

Thanks. Our repro internally seems to be on Mac Arm (M1/M2) machines - just to confirm that's the hardware you're on? 

[social_Canvas5FEA]

Nah I'm on a 2019 16" Macbook Pro, 2.3 GHz 8-Core Intel i9 CPU, AMD Radeon Pro 5500M GPU.

[jenkmeister]

Good to know. It is being worked on so hopefully we can get a fix sooner rather than later for you and everyone else suffering from this. Thanks again!

[social_Canvas5FEA]

Just thought I'd add, I've also experienced this/had colleagues experience this on 27" Intel based i7 iMacs.

I'm going to test my Windows machine when I get home from the office.

[nubnubbud]

@jenkmeister 
is there a chance we'll see any improvements for...
like, everything else? https://imgur.com/a/jP6OPa8 it's horrendous and basically unusable for anything beyond DV footage with a single precomp (the footage in the link is 6k, with one tracked 240x240 PNG on top. heavy, yes, but there's no reason for the UI to stop working when my CPU and GPU are below 80%, and the glitches present shouldn't happen at any resolution.)
for example. the preview UI updates much faster when beign dragged by a mouse. if you're gonna make a band-aid, a little script that forces an update like dragging the preview might be best. easy to undo too, if you ever get around to fixing it properly- but there's so many of these band-aids another on the pile dowsn't really hurt much either.

[jenkmeister]

@nubnubbud I'm not exactly sure what's going on in the video. Are you able to zip the project up and share it with us so we can repro? Is this any better/worse in 23.2.1 (or 23.3 which is about to release in the next 10 minutes)? 

[nubnubbud]

@jenkmeister 
I cannot, and since then, my lisence has been removed and I cannot access the program any longer. I just downloaded Nuke and have been using resolve for a month. Guess Adobe really just doesn't like me any more. shame. I'll just keep using my CS6 if I need it. CS6 never fails me.

The footage isn't mine to share, and it's quite massive, as it's raw. still, because that's what the program is designed to do, I expected it to work smoothly, but it couldn't even get the color space correct on ingest.

https://sonycine.com/testfootage/ has some footage from the same camera- specifically the prores at the bottom of the page, should be similar. take any 16 bit png and track it onto the footage, and you should get basically identical results. note I'm using a 1070 and intel 6700k. they're not powerful now, but if I had any success recently with AE I assure you... I would have upgraded by now. However, I've found that the performance on newer hardware is basically the same and at times worse. The delays from performance and waiting hours and days for renders has lost me so many clients, that I can no longer continue using the program as a professional. After all, who has time to wait 2 hours for a render just to preview an edit?

[jenkmeister]

Let me know if I've done this correctly? https://f.io/wV-7DMJ7

[Fresh Squeezed Creative]

@nubnubbud Hos is the learning curve with Nuke?

[Fresh Squeezed Creative]

@nubnubbud HOW* is the learning curve with Nuke? Gosh I cannot type on this new Pixel phone to save my life *facepalms*

[Marc Trzepla]

I’m honestly curious what the difference in circumstances are that Premiere’s code was re-written from the ground up to become Premiere Pro, but the same doesn’t -seem- to be the plan for After Effects.  I’d understand if AE was a niche product that only a handful used and not worth the investment of time/money, but that’s certainly not the case here.

[Warren Heaton]

@Marc Trzepla 

The prior version of Premiere's interface was modeled after film A/B editng.  While that allowed anyone who's edit film in that manner to quickly get to work, it was missing a fairly long list of features that other NLEs were providing (namely Avid Media Composer) like multuple tracks for picture and sound and both a Source window and a Program window.  It also didn't handle much more than 240p15.  Even with third party hardware from Radius, Targa, and Pinnacle that allowed for 480i60 and 486i60, the software needed to offer more if it was going to be used for broadcast and cable rather than just multimedia.  It was pretty fantastic for the time period, though, but I'm not sure the former version of Premiere was destined to win an Oscar for technical achievement like After Effects has.

Also for the mid-1990s, while After Effects paired up with Photoshop would take longer than what it competed against for broadcast graphics (largely due to hardware limitations - the Quadra 840AV was wicked fast for a desktop computer, but slow compared to proprietary video graphics hardware), the finished product looks just as good as systems costing a few hundred thousand dollars.

While technical issues come up, After Effects is not remotely in the same place Premiere was before it was deprecated in favor of Premiere Pro.

[nubnubbud]

@jenkmeister yeah, that's exactly what I did, but I can't get anywhere near that. note that on yours, the entire thing is rendered, as denoted by the green line. for me, I have 32 gigs of memory(considered an absolute pittance around here), but notice how quickly it filled up for me. I would be gladly willing to test it, but at the moment now that the price of food spiked, I'm suddenly fighting food and rent issues and need all the work I can do, and I just can't pay adobe's subscription (I have paid in excess of the price of a perpetual lisence, but it would bankrupt me now, so I'm forced to buy programs that do have perpetual lisences, or use CS6. yes I understand a subscription is cheap and should pay off- I cannot justify it when it's for a program that my clients won't accept me using). if you guys want me to do bugtesting, I'll need to be paid, or have a lisence that won't actively harm me.

still, while I can't provide more than that footage (it's months old, I took it while working on the project last october and I only have a few leftover clips stored for a reel), look at how it keeps purging the preview the moment anything is touched. I really don't know how you got the program to be so stable, but it's not just my specific hardware. People running 4090's and 12900k's I suspect are having very similar issues,  and I don't think "but 6 year old hardware is unusable" flies as an argument anywhere but the richest regions. one of my coworkers was using a 2013 macbook air to render heavy VFX simulations. performant code is king.

It seems that @Warren Heaton and verious devs are unaware that they're doing something which enables performance the rest of us, and the support teams don't know about (if they did, my 7 calls to them in the last year would have done something more than gotten visual studio SDK 2003 to 2019 and nvidia's studio drivers installed. they gave up after that, saying I was a lost cause.) Whatever your secret sauce is, neither you nor us knows what it is, but for me, premiere never worked like that, even when I was using it on purpose made workstations during a class on video editing. I can only assume you have a NASA supercomputer if it was all rendered at once the moment you hit play to preview an adjustment, and it all fit on RAM.

@Fresh Squeezed Creative gonna be learning soon. haven't gotten started with Nuke. super busy, hope someone hires me soon so I can actually focus on learning new things. Resolve is pretty good as a replacement for Premiere, but some of the usability choices, like how zooming in works, are pretty iffy. Resolve's menus aren't very easy to resize either. I'm used to nodes 'cause I do VFX a lot, so they'll probably be easier for me than most. The biggest paradigm shift is that you have to explicitly tell the program how to manage plates, where in AE you have the assumption that all active plates can interact with one another as layers that always exist somewhere.

@Warren Heaton that similarity to physical systems is what makes AE and premiere so amazing. everyone agrees- it's approachable, easy to understand, and deserves better than "a small team that's doing its best to answer the users' concerns". we're not here because we hate it, we're here because we love it, and wish Adobe treated it (and by extension, us.) with an appropriate level of respect.

[Ando0o0]

I have zero plug ins installed on the fastest Apple computer money can buy right now and the UI is still laggy if you have over 20 layers and working in a 4K comp. 

[nubnubbud]

@Ando0o0 if you'd like, you can try picking up an old 2008 computer and try it- If I recall, I had pretty good 4K performance on an Intel Core i7 950 with a GTX 760
It'll probably do better if you use windows XP and CS6 too! try to find a 2011-2012 system and run CS6 on it! I was getting pretty snappy playback with 4k and even 3D effects back then!
and then the subscriptioning happened.

[social_Canvas5FEA]

Here's a video showing my experience with interface lag in After Effects.

I have no plugins installed, I'm using no expressions or code.

In fact, there are no effects being used in the project I'm working on at all.

My composition is a 1920x1080 project comprised of two solids and 10 shape layers with basic shapes of a logo which I'm animating. Only Position and Opacity parameters are being animated using keyframes.

VIDEO:

VIDEO OF ISSUE 

The lag is abhorrent.

This is a fully up-to-date version of After Effects (2023, 23.3.0 Build 53) running on MacOS Ventura 13.2.1.