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]

@social_Canvas5FEA Thanks for reporting this. Are you able to share your project with me? You can DM it to me if you can't share publicly. 

[social_Canvas5FEA]

@jenkmeister unfortunately I'm not able to share this one. Sensitive client work. However when I get a project I can share I'll send it over.

[nubnubbud]

@social_Canvas5FEA I think they're in denial at some point. people like warren seem to be coping, and the adobe employees probably have, like a gag order or NDA and they're like
"don't worry, we see your concerns and helpimstuckinabugfactory we'll adress them soon"

[nubnubbud]

@Fresh Squeezed Creative also! a while back you asked me about Nuke! it's pretty great! The noncommercial version's biggest hurdles, are they don't tell you about where they crippled it, so you might suddenly find a useful node doesn't work or certain features are missing. Mistly, though, it has feature parity with After effects, and a much greater ability to make template files for certain effects. Best of all, it'll output minutes of 4k footage with dozens of effects in under a minute on a 7 year old budget system! nice! the only thing lacking is quality tutorials. it's expensive enough that it scares away the enthusiast or hobbyist types that make tutorials.

[Warren Heaton]

@nubnubbud 

While issues come up now and again with After Effects and my feature request list is farily long, I'm able to delivery content for broadcast television daily using After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator as well as a good selection of third party plugins.  If it's not working as well as for someone else as it is for me, I'm happy to compare notes.

Nubmubbud, what else would you like to see in addition to members of the After Effects team offering to personally open a project that is presenting unexpected issues for a user?

[nubnubbud]

@Warren Heaton well for one, you keep saying "I can do this just fine" but never have I heard you post any of your specs, machines, workflows, or use cases beyond "I do broadcast", which is a very odd use case for After Effects. if it's live TV, after effects would surely be absolutely terrible, and if it's daily, it can't be more than pulling a basic key with a background or you're looking at 8 hours just to render a 22-44 minute clip for a daily program. a minute or two easily exceeds half an hour of rendering if you do anything beyond a color correciton and a mask.

but as for your question...

I paid for a program that works as described, and I did not get it.
I'm tired of spending more and getting less.
I'm tired of being told my computer was what got worse when the program updated.
I'm tired of devs deciding that my favorite output format "is out of date" then adding it in again half a decade later.
I'm tired of performance "increases" that just take the performance and push it somewhere else.
I'm tired of ever increasing system requirements that make me pay for better hardware, so adobe doesn't have to pay for proper development.
I'm tired of hearing how overstressed, understaffed, and abused the team is, while their company makes record profits.

I'm tired. I'm so, so tired... of not owning the tools I use to feed myself, and I resent that I'm supposed to be thankful for the privelage to do so.

[nubbyninja]

@nubnubbud I feel what you said. I feel it in my soul. 
And I can say that, even with bleeding-edge hardware, AE's performance and stability issues persist. 
I've gone from i5960 to i6950x for CPUs and I've gone from dual and even triple (on SLI) EVGA (rip) 1080ti FTWs with 64gb of DDR3 to a Threadripper 3990x with 256gb of DDR4 @3200 Mhz with a 2080ti FTW3 to an Aorus 3090 extreme waterforce. But even with my new AMD 7950x and 4090 with 64gb of DDR5 @6000 Mhz I STILL run into crashy, laggy projects with random crashy issues with stock fonts on a fresh Windows 10 or 11 install. 

For the longest time I thought it was just me, I thought I was the one to blame for misconfiguring something. I'm a long-time AE lover, and I've been using Adobe products since before they were Adobe products.... and I can say with absolute certainty that software as a service has not improved my own experience. CS3 to CS6 I loved the crap out of Dreamweaver, Photoshop, the list goes on. 

I do enjoy SOME of the improvements involving multi-threaded rendering and previews, things that should have been worked out years prior. Almost everyone I know has been avoiding Adobe software for years, and I'm the only holdout. 

Sadly, I think I'll be moving on to greener pastures before long, since I've learned how to replicate almost every effect I could make in AE in other software, much of it being freeware. 

If Adobe wants to keep us aboard, or bring us back, addressing their software with UX oriented around identifying "the lag" and letting us perform analysis through profiling so we can quickly and easily identify what aspect of our AE "editor" is causing problems. 

A great place to start would be drawing inspiration from Unity's profiler which analyzes the whole execution stack at runtime, allowing a developer to quickly draw down on things hampering performance and strategize ways to counter and prevent drops in perf. 

Hopefully shaking the trees here will knock something loose. 

[Warren Heaton]

@nubbyninja 

RE: 
If Adobe wants to keep us aboard, or bring us back, addressing their software with UX oriented around identifying "the lag" and letting us perform analysis through profiling so we can quickly and easily identify what aspect of our AE "editor" is causing problems. 

Have you had a chance to use Safe Mode and the Effect Manager yet?  These just came out of beta with After Effects version 23.4.

[Warren Heaton]

@nubnubbud 

Yes, After Effects is used heavily in motion graphics for broadcast television, having replaced Henry, Paint Box, Combustion, Flint, and Flame.  You described what is called "playout" for live tv and VizRT is used for that.  I think you'd like VizRT, it makes strong use of high-end NVIDIA graphic hardware.  VizRT even has a plugin to load After Effects projects, but I think most operators prefer pre-rendered animations.

If you have the time to take another look, I think you'll find that best practices for workflow, system specifications, and use cases are discussed quite a bit in these forums (by me and others) as well as the help documentation.

I'm sorry to hear that you are having a difficult time.  Have you thought about pivoting to something similar that makes use of your skillset?  There are some things I miss about my freelance days, but having to purchase my own high-end hardware and license software and third-party plugins for it is not one of them.  While After Effects is a must-know for junior and senior broadcast motion design jobs, it's the number one hard skill that post-production employers are looking for followed by Premiere Pro, and Photoshop.

[social_Canvas5FEA]

@Warren Heaton 

I'm able to deliver creative on a daily basis too, but I wouldn't call the experience good.

[scrozier]

I did briefly experience the glory of a smooth Adobe interface, but it was only when I borrowed my friends M2 MacBook Air. I don't see why a 2080ti and a 24 core processor can't move a key frame smoothly, when every other app I use (mainly blender/resolve) can move 100s of keys or most of the interface at 60+fps. My computer is only 2 years old and still near top of the line until pcie-5 becomes a thing. 

 @jenkmeister any progress on getting Windows to run @60+fps? I think I saw you mentioned you had an m.2 machine running at around 90fps for the interface. Please give us parity on the windows workstations! I have noticed some small gains but still a ton of jank across the board on many layered comps. 

[GoatWar2000]

Strongly recommend looking at Notch (notch.one) a realtime graphics engine for motion graphics - it's heavily used in all the big live shows but can also be used for offline rendering. They've also got a massive upgrade coming out soon. Notch is aimed at designers far more than unreal which a sledgehammer cracking a nut for most motion graphics tasks and has a workflow that doesn't encourage experimentation.

As an example of how backwards AE is, you  you render your scene from notch at very high res, let's say 8k (I have worked on live shows at even higher reses than that, up to 24k wide!) and it'll do it in pretty much near realtime...

Then you bring it into AE to do a few tweaks (nothing hardcore) and try to render it out again, and laugh as the estimate tells you 5 hours. I mean...it's would be hilarious if it wasn't so infuriating.

Actually one of the 24k scenes I did took 6 DAYS to render from AE

[jenkmeister]

Getting Windows to the faster fps refresh is going to take quite a bit of work so it'll be a while unfortunately. This is one area that is really old code and it needs a lot of work. Which we are doing, but it'll be a while. We are still also working on specific use cases to fix to try to improve the situation with the current code best we can too.

[scrozier]

Thanks for the update, it's good to hear. Hoping this can remain a priority. I can imagine there is pressure to devlop a bunch of whiz bang generative AI driven features, but at the end of the day if the interface is a clunker, who will want to use it. 

[Lasse Gjertsen]

"A while"? Are we talking months here? Years?
We've been begging for this, literaly since the last decade. This is beyond frustrating. It's sad.
So much time me and my fellow artists here have invested learning this program over the years.
Such a waste of our time...

So thanks a lot for yet another announcement of disappoing news!

P.S. The latest update made the program even slower by the way...
I don't how the hell it's possible, but you did it.

Congratulations and good luck, tiny AE team.

[scrozier]

Transparancy is not Adobe's strongsuit, but even knowing they are working on it gives me a shred of hope. But I agree, its really frustrating, especially given the speed of development of most other software. 

[jenkmeister]

@Lasse Gjertsen Hard to comment on exact timing. It's an entire team of engineers priority right now though. 

When you say "latest version made things slower" do you have specific details? 23.3 or 23.4? What part of AE is slower? We've been putting fixes into the UI performance over the past few months and I'm not aware of anything we've made slower so if there is something, please let me know so we can address it. 

[nubbyninja]

Can we expect Adobe or the team behind AE to start work on something more robust soon? If AE is so hard to coax more performance out of, it's time to start building a new suite of tools to replace it, no?

The codesphere for development of applications like this has changed a lot in the years since AE came about. It hasn't evolved at pace. If it's the core of it that's so difficult, it's time to start again.

[nubnubbud]

@nubbyninja 
everyone's saying that, but in the end, the decision to do so is at the hands of people who don't use the program or develop it, so the most likely response will be "why make something new, we have an editing program at home."
the editing program at home:

 

[nubnubbud]

@Warren Heaton already have. Nuke very much does everything I need it to do. I just keep after effects at the ready for spots where I need lots of quick and dirty edits, which is where it excels. 
What I hate is how, after 2014, quick and dirty became unreliable and dirty. There's an inherent benefit to just being able to layer footage and say "yeah put this over there, mask this out, parent this to that track, and we're good.", that no other program delivers. well, except for the competition. https://www.left-angle.com/?page=95-en which is quite compelling, as they have a perpetual lisence, something adobe seems incapable of, bless the poor incompetents.

[nubnubbud]

@Lasse Gjertsen "a while" means decade+, in adobe speak. They removed H.264 and after outcry, and being the top request, it took 5 years of petitioning to get it back in a gimped state, and after they added multithreading as a hack in 2013 or so, they removed it in 2015-2016, only to return the hack, also in a hobbled state, in 2021, after saying it was "top priority". 
so "top priority" means 5 years, and "a while" probably means "we don't care." or "we don't and probably will not be given the resources to make such a change"

The truth is, it works different on a macbook, because that's what I assume these programs are largely tested on. One of the most notable differences, is that RAM is more closely tied to the CPU on such compact systems, and is shared with the GPU, and Apple systems will use your hard drive for extra storage wholesale (which is also relatively fast and closely integrated in the newer ones). 

This basically means Adobe products are largely optimized for overpriced luxury items with specs well behind the curve, and 5-10x the price of other systems for said specs, with less than 30% market share. The largest difference is not really capability- that's software limited, mostly- it's the reliability of the customer.
AKA, a business decision to target brand-loyal clients who are already easy to take advantage of due to brand loyalty and captive audiences. 

call me a conspiracy theorist, but they use the same - vaguely round-edged metal chassis - lightning-connector toting -always unbranded but never not apple mobile device - and when it's not a mobile device, it's for sure an apple one for every ad, minus like, one or two ever. it's pretty clear what the message is. "if you sit down and work in a professional setting on well-specced computers, this isn't for you. This is for people who walk around a city and sketch a tree on a device meticulously designed to need repairs that don't exist".

With the performance delta, it feels like this program is a glorified upsell for an overpriced workstation worth more as a sculpture than a tool. It makes me wonder who it's actually for.

[social_Canvas5FEA]

@jenkmeister here's a new video showing terrible lag, and this time I can share the file in question with you:

File and video uploaded here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1q4fcrBhwmAu2q2P7Fs_2PxkedxftJm-q?usp=sharing

Honestly I don't think this is a project specific thing, I just don't think the interface is optimised well enough. We shouldn't need RTX4090's just to animate a box! Fully appreciate that there's lots of old code and I've no doubt it's a nightmare to deal with! But we pay a yearly premium and as a minimum, the software should run semi-smoothly.

Thanks for your continued work on this!

[scrozier]

Adobe is working on this don't worry! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdjf4lMmiiI&ab_channel=iowyyn

[jenkmeister]

@social_Canvas5FEA Thank you for the video and the project. This lag is caused by the layer overlays being enabled and admittedly, some very slow drawing code on Windows when those overlays are outside the bounds of the composition. If you turn off the layer overlays (View -> Hide Layer Controls) then you'll see some performance improvements. This is on our backlog to fix in a future update to AE. 

[social_Canvas5FEA]

@jenkmeister No worries. I've disabled this and will monitor performance.

I'm on MacOS FYI.