FAQ: How to reset (trash) preferences in After Effects?

It can be really frustrating when After Effects starts misbehaving. One of the most efficient ways to fix this is to reset After Effects preference files. Trashing preferences resets the program to its factory defaults.

Resetting preferences will undo most of your customization such as length of your default transitions, brightness of the user interface, labels colors, changes that you've made to your audio hardware settings and more. Some changes won't be affected though, such as changes that you've made to memory allocation for After Effects and other Adobe apps, new workspaces that you've created and some other stuff. It's worth noting that changes that you've made to existing workspaces (changes such as resizing panels and moving them) will be reset to defaults.

Preferences that you set for scratch disks, however, are saved with your projects. Whenever you open a project, it automatically defaults to the scratch disks you selected for it when you set up that project.

Here is how you can reset the preferences:

Press Ctrl + Alt + Shift (Windows) or Command + Option + Shift (Mac OS) while launching After Effects. You can release the keys when you see the Startup Repair Options dialogue box.

Manage Plugins – Open the plugin manager to enable or disable plugins one by one, or in a batch. 

Reset Preferences – Click the Reset Preferences button to permanently reset all preferences to default settings.

Start in Safe Mode – You can create a one-time After Effects session using default preferences by clicking the Start in Safe Mode button. You will also get an option to disable third-party plugins. It helps you identify if any of your current preferences are corrupt and need a reset. If After Effects works best in safe mode, you can reset preferences permanently the next time you launch After Effects.

If you don't see the list of your recent projects on the Welcome Screen the next time you launch After Effects, the preferences were reset correctly.

NOTE: Nothing happens to the project files; it's just that After Effects's recent directories are wiped off too. Navigate to your project location and open it from there.