After Effects 2022 - Major performance issue - Slow UI - Long time to close - Preview flickering

[GB008]

Hello,

At our studio, we have updates our computers from Adobe 2019 to Adobe 2022.
We are dealing with major performance issue with After Effects 2022. (2022.2 & 2022.2.1)

Here is a list of our complain:

1. Opening After Effects : Very slow to open. about 25 to 30 secondes every time (With blank windows freezing and hanging like 10-15 seconds).

2. Closing After Effects : The software take very very long time to close. Even when there is no project load. It take time from 10sec to a whole minute to complety close after click on the closing cross. What is it doing that whole time ?

3. Not responding UI : When we switch the view from an other software (Like Chrome, Firefox, Photoshop, ...) to get back on After Effects, the UI is very laggy the first 4-6 secondes. Making click, selection, timeline scrubing not smooth at all.

4. Preview flickering: It happens a lot of time that when we are making timeline preview, older frame from older preview are present in the newer preview, even when drastic change are made (Added new layer, changed effect settings,...)

5) Random slowdown of UI. Randomly, the UI becomes quite slow. Opening the comp setting panels takes 3 seconds, create a new layer (CTRL + Y) take 2-3 secondes, renaming the layer delay from 2-3 seconds and much more.

All these where not present in AE 2019 and these make working with AE 2022 very painfull, not effective and very time consuming.

Can something be done to be corrected ?

All of our other sofwares are running smothly (3Ds Max 2022, iClone 7, Cinema 4D, Photoshop 2022, ..)

Here is our computers spec:
Windows 11 Pro 64Bits

AMD 3950X (16 cores 32 threads) - 64Gb RAM DDR4 - 480gb SSD Nvme

Nvidia GTX 1070 (Studio Driver 511.65)
2x  Monitor Dell 2560*1440

Thank you

[nishu_kush]

Hi GB008,

Thanks for writing in and sharing the system specifications.

All the issues that you mentioned, points to a GPU driver that's not working properly for some reason (my initial thought). If your GPU driver is updated already, try doing a clean install of it. Few other things you can try:

1. Disconnect the secondary monitor and test.
2. Clear media cache and reset the preferences of After Effects.
3. Make sure that user account permissions are not restricting After Effects or GPU driver to work properly. An easy way to check this is to create a new admin account and test the performance in it.

Let us know how it goes.

Thanks,

Nishu

[GB008]

Ok, we take some time to test different case.

As for point 1 : Opening After Effects:

We find ou the slow sartup time we due to a script panel call "Duik Automations". We have switch to the all-in-on Duik Bassel 2 (Which incorporate Duik Automotions) and the Startup time have gain from 25-30 secondes to 5-8 seconds.

Problems with other points are still present.

We find a new bug :
5) Not Updating Frame count on "Reload Footage". We are doing 3D frame rendering on our renderfarm, previously on AE 2019 we were loading partial sequence wich has been rendering (Ex: Frame_00-137) and start working on them. 25 minutes later, when the 3D renderfarm had finished the rendering, we would Righ-click on the sequence in After Effects and hit "Reload Footage"; it would automatically reload the footage with all the frame ( Frame_00-350). But in AE 2022, nothing happened, it keep to "Frame_00-137". It does not take in account the newer frame. We have to replace them indivually. Take a lot a time.
We tried to check 'Verify Individual Files (Slower)"  in the Import Settings but with no change.

[GB008]

Thank you Nishu kush for your answer.

Here are our result with your advice:

• Disconnect the secondary monitor and test: No difference
• Clear media cache and reset the preferences of After Effects : Seems to affect a little and gain some time on After Effects closing time. It takes now 5-7 secondes to close. Acceptable.
• Make sure that user account permissions are not restricting After Effects or GPU ... :  Can not make it at the moment due to OS constraint in our work enviromment.
• Clean install of GPU Driver : We made a clean install with the Nvidia Game Ready Drivers (Not the Studio Drivers) and we installed the latest X570 AMD Chipset Driver . This seems have to fixed the laggering UI and responsiveness of the overal usage. Great !
  Also, it seems to stop the fact that when we would opened 3Ds Max (Even with an empty scene), AE would instantanly slow down and start to lag. After a few hours of working, not big slow down.
  
  

So far, Point 1 to 5 seems to be corrected and working.
Thanks

[GB008]

We have found one new annoying bug  .

6) Preview Cached frames freeze AE : In the Preview panel, we use the shortcut "0" (0 Numpad) to start previewing. If we check "if caching, play cached frames". A lot of time, After effects freeze from 10 to 50 seconds when we stop previewing (Depending of the length of the preview).
When we look at the Task Manager, it looks like AE is using 100% of the SSD on which the cache file is configured while it freeze. When the disk usage decrease, AE stop to freeze. What's happening here ?

[GB008]

Ok, so After Effect start to lag again.

It is very weird. It lags when we have 3Ds Max open at the same time as AE. 3Ds Max is open but nothing is computing or rendering. If a close 3Ds Max, After Effect become instantly fast and responsive.

It very very hard to work with that problem because we need to do a lot of back and forth between 3Ds Max and After Effect and cannot afford to close Max every 5 minutes...

[GB008 · Accepted solution]

Update :

It looks like all of our lags and UI freeze was due to Avast Antivirus.

We saw in the task manager that Avast was always using some CPU power when we were using AE. We uninstalled Avast and now everythings is working smoothly.

Even the problem "6) Preview Cached frames freeze AE" is not present anymore
After Effects is quite fast now !

Hope this thread will help others people.

[Alex36613696y2xu]

Yes. That solved my problem. Thanks.  It was Lightroom not AE. But same problems lagging freezing.  Deleted Avast and now it's flying ! 😄 😄