Severe Lag in After Effects 24.6.1

[Ad�nLandrabes]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been experiencing a frustrating issue with After Effects (version 24.6.1) on my Windows 10 PC,. The problem occurs when working with video files in a composition. The entire program becomes noticeably laggy and slow, especially when pausing, playing, or right-clicking on a video in the timeline. This lag also extends to the menus, such as Composition or Layer, where there’s a significant delay in response (sometimes even freezing for 1 minute).

After spending hours trying to figure out what’s causing this, I discovered that the issue seems to be related to the video file itself. If I have a different media type selected, like images or another composition, the lag disappears. So, I concluded that having this particular video file selected triggers the performance issues.

The problematic video was edited in After Effects and Premiere, then processed with Media Encoder. When I imported a similar video (edited and processed the same way), I didn’t encounter the lag. The only difference between the two files is that the video causing the issue contains metadata, specifically tags that were added in Premiere. The second video (which works fine) doesn’t have any metadata because I didn’t use those tags in Premiere.

Both videos were processed using the YouTube 1080 Full HD preset in the latest version of Media Encoder. My PC meets the recommended system requirements, though I’m using an AMD graphics card, which has presented other unrelated issues with Adobe products (that’s a topic for another time).

As a final test, I re-exported the problematic video using the same settings, but this time I disabled metadata both in Premiere and in Media Encoder’s export preset. Once I imported the newly exported video into After Effects, the issue was completely resolved.

[jenkmeister]

Are you able to share the video with us? We did some work to speed up videos with metadata in recent releases but perhaps you've created a file we didn't account for.