After Effects makes my MacBook freeze and crash

I might have found the solution. Try this, go to: Preferences > Display > uncheck/disable Hardware Accelerate Composition, Layer, And Footage Panels. After doing so, AE no longer freezes randomly. 

Same issue here for months now! Every now and then it works okay and then a period of it just freezing and crashing. I am so sure it is not a problem with my MacBook, it used to handle projects like this just fine back last year in October! I'd like to say it started happening when I upgraded to Sonoma by some autoinstall that wasn't planned. ..
I have a MacBook Pro 2019, 32GB
If anyone has any updates or solutions I'd love to hear it!

I've been struggling with the same problem and after 2 tries with tech support I'm hopping this is the fix. 
After Effects in my case seemed to be having permission issues so it needed full disk access. 

"Alright, please allow full disk access to After Effects and Creative cloud, please ensure your work is saved and both apps are closed:

1. Click on the apple symbol
2. Click on System Preferences
3. Look for Security and Privacy
4. Click on Privacy Tab
5. Look for full disk access and enable it for After Effects and creative cloud.

Note: If it is not present in the list then please click the + icon at the bottom and add it."

Hope it can help someone

I was also recently having this issue. I tried a number of things and I think I might have cleared it up by deleting any .plist files within the Mac HD>library>preferences. I was hesitant to share because I'm not currently in a large AE project. Maybe someone else can see if this works for them too?

Joining the club. 2019 16" MacBook Pro, 64 GB RAM, AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8 GB VRAM, macOS Ventura 13.6.6, After Effects 24.2. This has been the most stable After Effects machine I’ve ever used in nearly 20 years. Recently my last two large projects have been freezing the entire UI except the mouse cursor, until eventually the OS automatically reboots (via watchdog). Audio (Music.app) continues playing, I can even be on a Teams audio-only call and even continue talking with my colleagues. My project files have been fine, thankfully.

I recently enabled remote access (ssh) to try and salvage it by killing processes, but haven’t been fast enough before watchdog auto-reboots it. I suspect the WindowServer process is crashing. The next time it happens I’ll try killing WindowServer and seeing if I get any luck (killing loginscreen does not help).

My machine is definitely experiencing higher load while working on these past two large projects, not just the complexity of my AE comps (significantly higher than my typical jobs), but OneDrive and fileproviderd both constantly using nearly 100% per processes (likely thanks to tens of thousands of exr files in these jobs). Maybe it’s all related. Unfortunately deadlines are looming and I don’t have time to investigate.

I've been having the same issue for what feels like a year now, on busy days it'll crash every 10 minutes like someone mentioned here. I contacted Adobe Support and had multiple assistants try to fix it by remote access, but no luck, it also doesn't help that I can't show them how it crashes, it just freezes out of nowhere and the MacOS restarts after a few minutes, it's unpredictable and I never got any error messages from it, sometimes it'll even crash as soon as I open a project or when I try to move the needle through the composition, so no pattern really to figure out the why. Last time I uninstalled it and tried to get rid of all preference files and it worked for a few weeks, but just now it crashed again and this is sooooooo frustrating!

Any updates on this at all from anyone? I've been having the same issue with my 2019 MacBook Pro as well for ages now! It seemed like for a while it stopped but now I'm busy again it's crashing and restarting my laptop every 10 mins or so! Near impossible to get client projects finished. After effects reinstalls, preferences wiped, MacBook updated all with no help, any ideas at all welcome 🥲

Hi everybody,

it is not only Intel. We have multiple machines. All working fine. AMD (Win) Intel (Mac) but on the new M3 Max macbook it just closes. No message no hint. Brand new machine, newest macos, newest adobe afx.

Not really a good sign. For now we have to work on the older machines

Just take the time and re-read all the posts. This is clearly a software issue on Adobe's side that is causing the shutdowns.

The machines that are mentioned here are absolutely sufficient to handle advanced video editing without crashing. Some (mine) got 64GB RAM and a proper GPU. After Effects has been running properly on those machines for years and other video and 3D software runs very smoothly. Still you come here and say your idea of a fix is to upgrade the hardware, because those machines can't handle it? Come on, that is plain wrong. If anything, your advice is good for another reason: Adobe will not do sh*t to fix this for older machines.