AE Hangs on Window Focus (Windows 10)

[Zondervan123]

Whenever I switch focus to AE from another window, AE's UI freezes for several seconds before I can use it again. My keypresses and cursor clicks seem to be registered, but nothing updates visually until the UI un-freezes. It's almost like the program goes to sleep when it loses focus and I have to wake it up.

I've tried switching to Software Only rendering mode, disabling Hardware Accelerate Composition/Layer/Footage Panels, and my Disk Cache is 800GB on a dedicated internal SSD.

I haven't been able to find anything else online for this, so I'm hoping that someone else has at least run into the same annoying issue. I'm not sure when it started but it's persisted through a Windows re-install and several AE updates. I don't have this issue with PR or any other Adobe app, let alone non-Adobe apps.

After Effects 23.0.0 (Build 59)
Windows 10 Home 21H2 Build 19044.2251
Intel i7-8700K @ 3.70GHz

48GB RAM (8GB reserved for non-Adobe applications)
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080

[JohnColombo]

Hi @Zondervan123,

Thank you for reporting this issue. Would you be able to share a screen recording of the UI freezing when After Effects is re-focused? This isn't something we are seeing in-house on our Windows testing systems.

When After Effects is brought into focus, it does numerous checks, e.g. checking the clipboard to ensure that the correct menu items are activated for any special pasted data. This shouldn't cause the app to hang up though, so something does seem to be amiss on your system. If possible, could you collect an application log and share it with us? Instructions for enabling logging are at the bottom of this post.

Do you have any third-party script panels or extensions running in your workspace? Or do you have any third-party plug-ins installed? We're aware of some plug-ins that can cause UI sluggishness like you've described simply by being installed, even without being used in a project.

To enable logging:

1. In After Effects, go to Help > Enable Logging, then close After Effects when prompted.
2. Re-open AE, open a project, and attempt playback.
3. Go to Edit > Preferences > General > Reveal Preferences in Explorer
4. In the folder that is revealed, please share the "After Effects Log.txt" that should exist in the "logs" folder.

Thanks for reporting this issue and for any further information you can provide,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

[Zondervan123 · Accepted solution]

Hi John,

Thank you very much for your response and for looking into this for me. Once you mentioned third party plugins I thought I should probably try disabling my extra scripts and plugins to see if vanilla AE still had the problem, before logging and recording it. After uninstalling all of my aescripts products using their manager app, it began responding correctly right away. I haven't used many of those scripts in a while, so I don't even know which one was causing the issue, but after re-installing only my most-used ones it still seems to work as expected.

I feel a little silly, but really glad to know and relieved to be back to normal.

In lieu of a screen recording, I will say that it did seem like the program almost seemed to be re-loading a plugin or script (likely a faulty version) when coming back into focus, so your explanation makes sense.

Thanks!

Kyle

[JohnColombo]

I'm glad that resolved the issue, @Zondervan123! Always good to hear that things are back to normal. Have a great holiday!

- John, After Effects Engineering Team