After effect 2024 is making life unbearable

[yellomotion]

I am writing to express my deep dissatisfaction and frustration regarding the ongoing performance issues I am facing with After Effects on my HP Pavilion Gaming setup. The software's persistent lag and freezing are making my work environment unbearable, and it's seriously impacting my motivation to continue using the application.

As an animator, I heavily rely on After Effects to bring my creative visions to life. However, the continuous disruptions caused by the software's poor performance are draining my enthusiasm and motivation to work. The lag and freezing have become so prevalent that it's increasingly difficult for me to complete projects in a timely and efficient manner.

Despite utilizing a system optimized for graphic-intensive tasks, After Effects seems to be pushing my HP Pavilion Gaming setup to its limits. This is reflected in the significant slowdowns and freezes, which occur even when I'm working with basic texts, expressions, and images.

I've tried various solutions, including updating the software to the latest version and adjusting project settings, but none have provided a satisfactory resolution. It's disheartening to see the software I once enjoyed using become a major source of frustration, hindering both the quality of my work and my overall productivity.

I urgently request your immediate attention and assistance in resolving these performance issues. The continuous struggle with After Effects is not only affecting my professional output but is also diminishing my passion for animation. I fear that unless a solution is found promptly, I may be forced to explore alternative software options, which is not a decision I take lightly.

I appreciate your prompt attention to this matter and hope for a swift resolution that allows me to regain my enthusiasm for using After Effects.

[ToolfarmJP]

Have you checked the system requirement to run After Effects properly?

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/system-requirements.html

[yellomotion]

I fall within the scope, i use a Hp pavilion gaming laptop

And i belive it's a decent PC to run this... Below is the spec of my Pc

i look forward to hearing from you soon, thanks

OS: Windows 11 pro

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-10300H CPU @ 2.50GHz, 2496 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)

System Model: HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop 16-a0xxx

Installed Physical Memory (RAM): 16.0 GB

System Type: x64-based PC

Chip type : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 

[Acts2v38]

I agree, I'm having the same problem. What a terrible upgrade.

[akaBEZ]

I have a system with rtx 3090, 128gb ram and AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core
by all means a beast of machine that should eat my simple after effects file (with one layer and no effects!!!!) for breakfast

yet after 30 minutes of work after won't play anymore, (my guess is because there is sound in the video?) and it will just render the green line and that's it.

I need to restart after so I can play preview again.
128gb ram and 24gb vram!

So yeah, after 2024 is as useless as Adobe is

[salernocreative]

LOL!  I have literally the same pc build as you and I can't get renders out because AE crashes.  My comps wont preview images, I have to wait like 5mins and then the image shows up.  It constantly switches my gpu to mercury software renderer, so I have to go into project settings every 3mins and switch it back to GPU renderer to even play my timeline.  It crashes constantly when I add default effects like "Hue-Colorize"....boom dead.  It's so ridiculous, we pay so much money for these stupid subscriptions and it makes our jobs unbearable.

[InfiniteWhale]

It's no secret that After Effects is getting worse every year, but in the last few major releases they have taken it to another level.  Working with animating shapes and text is UNBEARABLY slow in AE 2024, and considering this is the main USP for After Effects (serious vfx and compositing is not done in AE) it's actually laughable that Adobe aren't focusing resources on making this smoother. 

I have been testing by copying and pasting a group of shapes from one shape layer into another, and no matter what I do it takes a full 30 seconds every time.  Using AE is generally this slow, and I feel like 50% of my day is spent waiting.  After Effects has become like a lame horse that needs to be put out of its misery.  It's seriously bad! 

[ṇubbudbud]

Welcome to dead-to-rights compositing software. It got its last functional update in 2012, as far as I'm concerned. Even rotobrush is less stable. AE is not stressing your system as much as it is wasting the resources as inefficiently as possible. Note that Blender, free software, can simulate light propagation often faster than it can display it, and AI stuff can spit out entire images in 10 seconds, but moving a shape under transparent text? That'll be an 11 minute render. If you're looking for better harware utilization, you might want to try nuke NC or davinci resolve, but there are also new layer based edotors on the block too. Leftangle Autograph (as impossible to search as it is) is doing most of what I said Adobe needed to do or they'll be dead in the water with 2/3rds of theor media suite being replaced by software that actually uses GPU.

[ImaginaryX]

Yeah, I'm also going through very similar issues with After Effects right now. The main problem I'm having to deal with is that it crashes whenever I'm trying to add or edit simple effects (like texts, for example), and mostly whenever I try to open an After Effects project file. This problem has never been this aggravating in any other year besides 2024.

For me, I believe this all started back in April of this year. I remember moving all my equipment into my brother's room and away from my Ethernet cable because my room was being painted at the time, and that's when I started having these really aggressive crashing problems when I was trying to finish a big video project. At the time, I could only assume that it was because I wasn't connected via Ethernet. Luckily, I was able to finish my project in time, and once I was able to move all my equipment back into my room, I hooked up the Ethernet cable back into my PC and began working on my next After Effects project... and noticed that the crashing problem STILL hadn't gone away!

By that point, I looked up every possible solution after solution and nothing seemed to have steered the problem away! I'm going to try and list every "fixes" I've tried doing:

• Clearing the media disc cache on all my Adobe programs
• Cleaning databases
• Cleaning the Windows 11 font cache
• Cleaning all Windows 11 cache in general
• Uninstalling, restarting the PC, then reinstalling After Effects
• Removing any plugins that could be interfering with the problem
• Using the Adobe Cleaner software.
• Closing as many applications that were running in the background as possible.
• Updating my drivers
• Changing my Media Disc Cache directory folder, as well as all my Adobe file directories, to my 8TB Ironwolf Hard Drive.

So yeah, NONE of these solutions worked at all! I've also attached some images that show what pops up whenever my After Effects project crashes. Keep in mind that sometimes the program DOESN'T say anything whenever it crashes. Instead, it just closes by itself. I pray to God that Adobe figures out what's going on because this is getting ridiculous. I've only just finished college, and I'm preparing to work as a freelance video editor. I do not want to go through this problem for another year.

[ṇubbudbud]

@ImaginaryX 
This guy basically mirrors most of the sentiment of the semi-pro to pro mindset about these things... and had your exact issues with the software 2 years ago:
https://youtu.be/fYSsnKqDl6I?t=637  is a newer statement,
https://youtu.be/YeopaTW16kA?t=132 and this is the one from 2 years ago;  that entire podcast is well worth a watch- it's a dive into the mind of well rounded VFX artists on a small team who is actually putting down money for adobe software.

For software designed for 1993 computers which hasn't gotten a total, 100% rewrite in that time, being used by millions of people, anything under 25 devs I would say wouldn't even be enough to maintain this hulking beast of legacy code. Just try to import a layered EXR (which is an industry standard, free VFX workflow, mind you.) it's still using popup windows on import and a button in the effects settings in order to access file information, instead of displaying it, using a dropdown to select the active channel, or reading the file natively, all of which would be a very swift answer and reduce user confusion.

[ṇubbudbud]

@ImaginaryX  sorry about the link spam, adobe's not letting me edit embeds. I hate that. but to add to it further; 
It's pretty well known right now, but everyone agrees;
speculators, to estimates from actual software devs, to people with inside information, everyone puts the dev workforce at optimistically under 30, maybe under 20 devs total working on this software, and pessimists suggest it's in the mid-teens.