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

[Chris - ULTRACHROMA]

Oh look! I built a new workstation! (Specs: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Cx/saved/gWRk99 )

What's amazing: Cinebench scores are fantastic! Lowest rendering time (quickest!) of the many years I've been running the AE Total Benchmark scene! Everything else I run other than AE is much improved!

What's not amazing: AE previews are still slow and the UI is laggy. And there's seemingly nothing I can do about it.

PugetBench results: Overall score of 1156. (The School of Motion article listed in the response from Victoria Nece shows a score of 985.)
https://www.pugetsystems.com/benchmarks/view.php?id=8834

CPU-Z benchmark results: 16336 (multi thread) / 499 (single thread)
https://valid.x86.fr/bench/mdpwvq

I am beyond frustrated at the state of this application. It is, without hyperbole, the greatest pain point in my professional life.

[adam_singer]

Honestly, I have been using after effects for 20 years and I hate it more than ever, with each passing year. I'm at the point where I use it only as a last resort and I can not WAIT until a decent competitor comes to market, and I will happily say goodbye to AE forever. The fact that this program has had almost no real development in over a decade tells one all they need to know about Adobe's management. I feel bad for the developers. For the love of God, please bring this program into the 21st century already. It just seems to get worse and slower with every update.

[scrozier]

Love how web browsers can scroll lines and lines and lines of graphics, text, and images smoothly and yet AE can't scroll s**t. The lack of TLC on some basic things like this makes me think they just don't care.

[the_dudes]

@Christopher Jeffries Threadrippers aren't the best for AE. Check Puget Systems for AE-PC building. They got great analysis. Also, the 1070 is terrible for GPU-Acceleration for nowadays. Putting in two of them doesn't improve anything. AE doesn't even use multi GPU.

[the_dudes]

https://digitalvideoaudio.typeform.com/to/R8yACg 👈 This survey of the AE-team is from April, but I filled it out anyways.

[Carlos Zenzuke Albarran]

Yes please, specially unbearable with one or more 4K screens.

[Lasse Gjertsen]

Just bought a secondary 4K screen to keep my timeline on, to get a better overview of layers and keyframes. Boy do I regret! It is SO SLOW AND LAGGY that I actually had to laugh out loud at the irony of a MOTION GRAPHICS software with more lag in the UI than in the actual graphics.

Looking forward to the day this is fixed, same day we land on Mars I suppose...

[nonibalogny]

Dear AE team just please put all your attention and effort into fixing this dumb bug and making your clients happy. not asking you to invent fire, it's not rocket science, just make it work better like in previous versions.
I see I'm not the only one suffering from this problem, it's among customers with high resolution screens. narrowed it down for you. Really frustrated with you.

[Fresh Squeezed Creative]

Yes, please!!!!!!!!!
Adobe, empower your professional day-to-day users, we don't NEED more bells and whistles. We NEED speed and efficiency. Like we had, back in 2014.

[JDLLC]

This is especially a problem with high dpi monitors (and I'd bet that 95% of working professionals have high dpi screens). Today I used the shortcut "s" to bring up my scale property. I waited 3 seconds before it popped up. I love faster render times, but a slow UI is unacceptable.

[JDLLC]

I have a moderate sized project that I'm working on today (75 layers in the current comp), however moving keyframes is an absolute pain. I'll click and drag a keyframe to move it, then release the mouse, the keyframe will go where I put it, then the keyframe will jump as if I was still holding the keyframe. It makes editing using the mouse almost unusable because the UI is so laggy.

[amazing_fashion5C22]

Box select in blender. Seems like actual selection only happens after you release the mouse which might help performance? Here's a video selecting 4000 - 8000 cubes.
It does start to lag just a tiny bit at some point, but again, 8000 cubes...

Could it be that After Effects constantly selecting and deselecting as you move the mouse makes it perform so poorly? If so, is there any good reason it works that way?

[amazing_fashion5C22]

Also here's an example of how a huge amount of keyframes is being handled in almost real time.
I understand there is no rendering so there is nothing to update, and yet After Effects starts losing it just after selecting more than a couple 🙂

[amazing_fashion5C22]

Also...

[NunoUdex]

I totally agree that Adobe is doing a lousy job concerning the performance of the applications.
I don’t understand how it is possible that all applications seem to get slower and slower with faster processors and GPUs.
I know I can’t compare directly but, how is it possible to have 3D games running 1080 or 4K with all special effects at 100+ frames a second and one simple animation in after effects with motion blur gets so slow to preview and render?????
Unreal Engine also has been showing mind blowing improvements. Adobe is stuck concerning speed!

Indesign and illustrator suffer from the same problem.

ADOBE I am looking for alternatives!

[Seb James]

I came on here today to try and submit a bug report as the interface and usability in this latest version of AE is shockingly slow and unresponsive. I'm trying to do some fairly simple mograph with type and shapes and the RAM preview sometimes doesn't even respond - so I have to restart the program - multiple times a day. Pressing Numpad "." to preview audio doesn't work half the time, and when it does the timeline indicator doesn't move so I've no idea where I am in the timeline. It takes SO LONG to just move along and up and down in the timeline sometimes.

I swear 99% of my stress at work is caused by Adobe software being slow and just **** at the simplest of tasks, it's so frustrating.

Adobe, sort it out!!

[GregJacobsArt]

I've noticed is that certain typefaces obliterate AE performance.

Raleway is a typeface I've used for various client projects - so when working on an animation, I tried to use the apt brand typeface. I made a new project for a dynamic text animation and put in the first bit of text and changed it to Raleway. Then, I animated it. Preview was worthless. Basic animation of a single word of text was painfully unresponsive.

I assumed that it was because I hadn't updated AE. I updated to the latest. Opened the project. No fix. I uninstalled and installed a version I knew was at one point more stable. I checked all the drivers, updated everything, came here, shook my fist once again at Adobe devs/leadership, etc. I tried everything I could think of, and AE was still an unusable piece of software - moving 1 word of type, it would lock up.

Then, realizing I just had to grit my teeth and work through it, I started a project from scratch and tried animating using the default typeface... and had zero performance issues.

I tried changing the text to some other typefaces, adding more text, animating it in the way I had on previous projects - and performance was acceptable. Adobe stuff is often not great. But everything was working as it had on previous projects.

I changed the text to Raleway... and discovered that - at least for me - that was the common factor for my horrible preview/performance issues. I'm not sure why a typeface which is legally installed would cause an issue. It's still terrible on Adobe's end that any typeface would cause issues.

Odd thing: Raleway was mysteriously uninstalled on my system a while back. I had to re-activate it via typekit and re-install it.

[StephaneA_AfterEffects]

I totally agree. Please Adobe, stop adding marketing features.
CC 2014 was working perflectly and then Adobe changed the code of the interface and since then the interface is going wrong.
The Ram preview is super buggy. It drop frames, it has audio problems, the green bar behaviour is totally eractic. The character panel is buggy too, the list menu is laggy, etc. etc. etc...
All this wasn't there before.
CC 2014 was working perfectly. Please revert back the interface (espacially the Ram preview part) to what it was in CC 2014.

[Lasse Gjertsen]

I'm doing character animation with Shape Layers on two 4K screens. Simply viewing many keyframes makes the whole program lag, especially when zooming in and out on the timeline. Selecting many keyframes increases the lag exponentially.

BUT when selecting only one keyframe/one path (still viewing all keyframes) the lag magically disappears and I can scrub the timeline more or less smoothly. What the hell is going on here?

The timeline also starts lagging when viewing the Waveform of a single Audio clip/layer.

Adobe, please fix these basic performance issues/BUGS before adding more 3D-features and etc. My workflow is seriously impaired because of this. If I could switch to another software I would do so instantly, but I'm stuck with this animation style midway in a 3 year project. Could as well have done this hand drawn, it would probably go faster...

Working in a 1-3 fps User Interface because the software struggles with viewing dots on a screen on a high end workstation in 2021 is completely unacceptable, ridiculous and extremely frustrating. Come on!

[truchan_milo]

Agree 100% ... its lagish as s**t

[Sterphy]

I'm genuinely near to tears with After Effects now. They have no interest in fixing things because we keep coming back - all they care about are the flashy bells and whistles that make a good promo video to hook in new users... and none of these features ever work - content aware fill, anyone? It's insane how messy AE is these days

[esmodafotografia]

Hace dos meses, tenia un i7 antiguo con 26 GB y discos sata.
Y hacia cosas con el AE

Ahora tengo un Ryzen 7 3800x 128 GB y un M2 pcie de 1TB para los programas
Y AE está muy difícil de trabajar a gusto...

El ratón tiene fluidez CERO

Intente con la versión 2020 y lo mismo.
Una desilusión total...

Four months ago, I had an old i7 with 26GB and sata drives.
And I did things with the AE

Now I have a Ryzen 7 3800x 128GB and a 1TB M2 pcie for the programs
And AE is very difficult to work at ease ...

Mouse has ZERO fluency

Try the 2020 version and the same.
A total disappointment ...

[the_dudes]

YES!

[Warren Heaton]

Why does this sound entirely like a display driver issue?

I've seen better performance on each newer machine on my end since, well Cosa After Effects 1.5. I typically upgrade machines every five to eight years.

The ability to continue to work in the Timeline while a Preview is running in recent versions? Amazing.

And the Comps range from light weight to 512 layers.

So, take a serious look at drivers.

[Lasse Gjertsen]

warren@thompson Definitely not a display driver issue. UI is laggy until I select a random path from one of the shape layers in the timeline. Then I can scrub the timeline and pan/tilt the composition window more or less smoothly. Goes from ≈3 fps to ≈15 fps.

I guess the UI responsiveness depends on what type of layers and effects used. I built a character rig with multiple shape layers with expressions for inverted kinetics and links to properties on other layers. A lot of expressions, indeed, but I used an even more advanced rig many years ago and AE was not this unresponsive; on a PC ten times slower than my current workstation.

I'm starting to wonder if the AE team have coded themselves into a corner; for AE to be backwards-compatible when importing older project files and etc. I kind of feel sorry for them, but they really need to sort this out.

AE isn't even utilizing CPU and GPU properly. Foreground auto-saving disrupting workflow. Always having to rely on scripts and expressions for basic functions. Still unable to copy/paste keyframes from multiple layers without duplicating the layers. I could go on for hours.

Luckily my yearly subscription runs out in a few days. I'm not paying for this anymore.