Can no longer change Theme UI Color in After Affects?

[drewc15557864]

Hi:

Up until the latest update (2025) for After Effects. I was able to change my Theme UI Color. This link shows a video of how you used to able to change the Theme UI Color: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r4-tdl_nqQ.

I contacted an Adobe Agent and he said several changes were included in this latest update of After Effects. He said to file a complaint here in hopes of getting that feature back again. The After Effects Version I am using is: 25.0.0 (Build 53) and I am running it on a PC with a Windows 11.  This may not seem like a big issue to some people but it's something I got used to as part of my workflow.  If you could bring this feature back it would greatly be appreciated!

[Warren Heaton]

The October 2024 (25.0) release uses Adobe's Spectrum UI.  As far as I am aware, prior modifications to the UI are no longer available. .

[drewc15557864]

Well, I sure hope Adobe brings back that UI option. I guess I will have to get used to seeing that boring "default blue" again:( 

[Warren Heaton]

Multi-frame render cut render time in half.  Not sure why you haven't seen similar results.  

I've also found 24.x to be the most stable release yet.  

[jefubbudu]

My guy, the most stable release I ever had was CS3. worked like a charm, no memory leaks, fast as F1, and I could render 2K, minute long comps in minutes in a $400 high school computer lab.

Multi-frame rendering did reduce render times, and it scaled well with cores, which is why people loved it.... then they took it away... and several years later they gave it back... and it wasn't as scalable, and even puget benchmark had a note on that, under why they no longer recommend high core counts. https://www.pugetsystems.com/solutions/video-editing-workstations/adobe-after-effects/hardware-recom...

for those who don't want to follow a link:
"After Effects used to make great use of high core count systems (including dual Xeon) but starting with AE CC 2015 most tasks no longer benefit from having a high number of CPU cores. This is largely due to the fact that Adobe removed the “render multiple frames simultaneously” feature in part due to the fact that they are starting to integrate GPU acceleration. While it used to be that more cores = faster, since higher core count CPUs run at a lower speed a CPU with around 8 cores will be faster than a higher core count CPU or even a dual CPU setup. Multi-frame rendering brought some of this back, but from our test data it doesn’t scale well enough for a dual CPU workstation to give an advantage over a single, high core count CPU."

the regression is real, and I'm sorry, but my experiences mirror what Puget Systems experienced;
multi-frame rendering is hugely less scalable and efficient than the simultaneous rendering hack, and the fact that they removed the faster, scalable version, and took years to give us a far inferior version speaks volumes of the lack of care and interest in maintaining a market presence, or a useful tool.

so, really, you can "Nuh Uh, I'm different!" as much as you want, to as many users as you want, but it won't stop the fact that everyone, including companies who build benchmarking software and optimize workstations to run it faster... agrees the software runs like lukewarm tar.

[Warren Heaton]

@jefubbudu 

Puget Systems has a wealth of information when it comes to making informed decisions about configuring a workstation or purchasing one of their pre-built systems; however, there’s content on their website that is out-of-date. For example, After Effects no longer uses multiprocessing and the page that you link to refers to an almost ten-year-old version that does.

Do me a small favor, Mr. Ubbadu, and find what Puget Systems currently recommends for “Best performance, especially with multi-frame rendering”.

Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously is an older technology that gave us the faster render times that everyone wanted, but a headache that absolutely no one needed with third-party plugins that didn’t support running multiple instances of After Effects to speed up some processes.

Multi-frame Rendering (MFR) is “a new technology in After Effects which utilizes all of the cores in your CPU in parallel.”  As far as using third-party plugins go, if it’s not updated for MFR then it’s effectively the same as rendering in Single-Frame Mode.

If anyone is curious about what, if any, faster render time MFR provides, they can do one render pass in Multi-Frame Mode and another render pass in Single-Frame Mode. Be sure to temporarily disable Cache Frames While Idle and to purge both the disk and memory cache between each render.

[jefubbudu]

I wasn't talking about now. I was talking about a previous regression, and that it hasn't been fixed. that regression being the scaling performance from low core counts to high core counts. The benefit of the old version, was that it seriously did not care- if you gave it more cores. it worked better. Now, you run into diminishing returns around 16 cores, and you're running into serious limits past 32. That is why AMD EPYC, in modern pugetbench testing, often cannot compete with their normal desktop cards, expecially when price is involved. 
we're out in the sticks here, and off topic, but it really isn't up for debate that after effects runs poorly after over  decade of nothing but bloat.

[Warren Heaton]

We're off the topic of changing the UI color due to your reply and you're referring to the software from two decades ago.  If you're getting better performance with After Effects CS3 on a $400 workstation, stick with it.  I stayed with CS2 until CS4 was released, but both ran great on whatever I was using at the time.  I think I was still on a Mac Pro G5 when CS2 was new, saving up for an Intel-based Mac Pro.

I have a work-issued 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro 16GB/512GB.  After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Media Encoder, and InDesign run well on it.  It's not going to win any render races, but After Effects has always provided options to work on lower-end equipment and then move to higher-end equipment if needed for finishing.  Also, After Effects and Premiere Pro have improvements under the hood for systems with low RAM in the latest release.

[drewc15557864]

Wow, this got way off topic from my initial thread:) "Can no longer change
theme UI color in After Effects.

[Warren Heaton]

@drewc15557864 

It did.

Sorry about that.

 I upvoted your post.

I preferred the yellow highlight of CS6.

[drewc15557864]

That's OK. I totally understand how things can quickly go from one topic to
another.
I really liked being able to change the theme color. Now it's back to the
boring blue.

[jefubbudu]

upvoted as well. I would suggest the devs download blender and look at its UI preferences. You can recolor things by element type, and even change the font characteristics. it's great for accessibility, and can be shared by exporting or importing a config file, so the devs (and everyone except the first user to do it) don't need to use production time to make accessibility modes

[MATEUSENKE]

If a large number of Adobe subscribers complain, maybe they will bring back the option to change the color of the panel and customize it as they like, we just need to know where to complain about this.

[drewc15557864]

I contacted Adobe Support yesterday 12/5/2024.  The option to change your theme color has been removed from After Effects.  The tech I talked to had no idea why they removed it.  I could have worked my way up the chain of command to try and get a real answer. However, I do not think I would get a better answer. More importantly, if and when it will be brought back (if thats even possible)? I guess for now, we are stuck with the three "Primitive" options.  

[Warren Heaton]

@drewc15557864 

As mentioned earlier in this support thread, it's due to the change to Spectrum UI across the Adobe applications.

Even thought it was not officially supported in the prior versions, it was nice to be able to change it and it would be great to see this in a future version - but we need to let the After Effects team know it's important and that requires a feature request with a good number of votes.