text insanely slow to render

[matteociaociao]

i am using AE 2018 v 15.1.2

win 10, core i7 5820k, 64 gb ram, gtx 1070ti

working on a 1920x1080 comp

i have to reveal 30 lines of text with a standard scaling up of every character (very simple stuff). there is nothing else in the comp.

when i ram preview (on a quarter of the resolution) ae gives me a super frustrating 0.2 frame per seconds. How is this even possible????

also i notice on the task manager ae seems unable to use more of 20% of the cpu.

[Martin_Ritter]

How did you made the text-animation? Did you use one of the animation presets or is every letter a separate layer with scale animation?

I the second case, the low performance sounds normal.

*Martin

[Mylenium]

Start by checking your GPU acceleration settings and what comp renderer you are using. Either you GPU is unable to render things like motion blur correctly in realtime, thus creating a performance bottleneck or you have set your comp renderer to Raytrace 3D or Cinema 4D, both of which also may only run in slow software-only modes.

Mylenium

[matteociaociao]

i think you are right it might be a gpu issue. (i dont have motion blur, or ray trace or c4d files, just a very simple ae scene)

5 minutes after my post, ae just stopped giving me previews, in any comp and in any project just gey screen.

so i restarted and now it works.

[matteociaociao]

Basically when i fire up ae everything seems fine....then the more i work the more it slows down.

[Martin_Ritter]

What about the cache drive - how is your drive-setup in general?

[matteociaociao]

i am using a normal hard drive (No ssd).

[matteociaociao]

The problem is definitely the text. when i have text in my comp everything becomes unresponsive, laggy and slow render.

i am not doing anything fancy, i am just animating random lines of code. it is as if the text object is insanely slow. even if i type the world "Hello" i can clearly see the performance dropping, if i convert the text "Hello" to shape layer everything runs better

[Martin_Ritter]

Have you tried different fonts?

[matteociaociao]

yes i did, some fonts are slower than others, but overall still unaccettable, this program should be able to handle more than 30 lines of text

[Martin_Ritter]

If AE slows down as soon as you put a font in your comp, try so reset preferences and consider a clean re-install. I would also clear the fonts (you can copy the files into another location and delete them from fonts-folder [Windows]). Use this little software to clean the registry afterwards:

http://code.kliu.org/misc/fontreg/

If AE slows down because your animation consists of hundreds of layers (every letter on a layer), this behavior is not surprising.

*Martin

[matteociaociao]

thanks for the help!

i am using AE 2018 v 15.1.2

this problem is present on all my colleague pcs, running same ae version with different pc specs.

i am having this problem with nothing but one text layer in the comp, as i said i am doing simple stuff.

what i would like ae developers to understand is that some people work in studios, i dont have administrator rights on my machine. troubleshooting theese problems is almost impossible for me. they cannot continue to release these buggy new versions.

every time there is a new ae version is a nightmare, i spend more time on the forums trying to solve new bugs than working.

i dont have these problems with c4d.

[Martin_Ritter]

Can you upload the project file?

I would like to give it a try on my machine. We have almost the same specs (but AE v 16.1.1 and SSDs everywhere) and I'm hardly running into performance trouble, beside doing a lot of motion graphics and character rigging on a daily basis.

[matteociaociao]

https://www.mediafire.com/file/d885pd9771aijn9/Test_1.aep/file

in this particular file i have a decent preview speed when i press space bar.

but the performance in the viewport is absolutelly orrible, if i try to move the shape layer i get crazy lag, really hard to work with this performance.

[Martin_Ritter]

CPU: i7 - 7700k @4.8 Ghz

RAM: 64GB

GPU: GTX 1080

OS: Win10 - latest I guess, it just updated this morning

I am on my Admin Account

OS and Software on SSD

AE Cache on M.2 SSD

Project files and Assets usually on NAS @ 1 GBit, in this case the project file was on SSD1, too.

Tested with AE v.15.1.2 - with and without GPU support

Almost thought of this: everything turns out very well.

The shape layer is a bit slower to move around when the text layer is activated, but far away from horrible.

Without text layer it is realtime, with text layer the border moves in almost realtime and the fill has some milliseconds lag.

I couldn't load the font (it was replaced with some standard) - maybe that is still something. Replace the font with Arial, just so be sure.

But when preview rendering is decent, I suspect the GPU driver for low performance in viewport. See if you can update it.

Are you experience lag beside this one? I once had a script open which slows down AE, closing it solves the issue.

Is it laging as soon as you put the text in - without any animation? I replaced the animator with simple position keyframing and it feels a bit faster, but not groundbreaking.

[matteociaociao]

your cpu 4.8 ghz probably helps a lot with after effects.

anyway i think i have a more clear picture of what is happening here.

when i start after effects everything runs ok (very slow but ok). and then after working for 10 /20 min everything becomes super slow and unresponsive, so at this point if i close ae i get this error: string memory leak ( 83 :: 2)

[zounicz74580479]

I have exactly the same problem.

- Rendering a project on my Mac Mini (2018 / i3 / Full of ram) takes 2 hours and 10m

- Rendering the same project on my MBP (2019 / i9 / Full or ram) takes 9mn !!

- Rendering the project on the Mac Mini with text layers de-activated takes 8mn !!

Did you solved the problem ?

I'd be very interested !

[satisfied_fierceness98C6]

Yes I also have the same problem, the lag doesn't even let me move any object around, the font I was using was the famous Apple font "SF Pro text", after I changed to any other font or converted the text to shape!, everything got back to normal.

[Vincent Br.]

I had the exact same problem. While making a video to present an application, everything was very slow. I was using the Apple font SF PRO  font. As soon as I changed to another font. Everything worked just fine

[Sterphy]

Text is very slow for me too on AE 2020... one layer of imported video and ONE line of text. Cache is on a dedicated SSD, GPU enabled... on AE 2018 I did a very complicated text animation with dozens and dozens of lines of text, same computer, everything was fine.  On 2020 I can barely type it's that slow. I just timed it at 4 seconds per letter to just type! It's insane, I've just finished a ten minute animated sitcom, all in AE, hundreds of layers, but adding a simple line of text is slowing it down. Generally I've found performance a bit slower in 2020 than I'm used to, but this text thing is ridiculous. 

[Groog71]

I've been struggling with exactly the same problem for weeks.  I've a load of ongoing projects with tons of animated text.  These are short films for banking products so then need updating constantly.  The problem does seem to lie with where the text was coppied from and what data it brought with it.   There's a script available from here for $39

https://aescripts.com/pt_textedit/ 

Basiaclly it allows you to edit all the text layers in a project simultaneously.  So just by changing the font across the entire project the changing it back again you can solve the issue.  

[_Maido_]

Same issue here, Type rendering is ridiculously slow, other machines with same specs have no issues, just my machine. 
I have not debugged it and I'm not sure if that makes sense technically, but I was thinking maybe it could be a third-party font manager issue somehow. Do you have something installed, maybe even a few of them and creating some conflicts?

Win 10, AE 2020

[matsvm]

Can confirm: text layers cause horrible lag After Effects. When I switch from cc2020 to cc2019, I don't have this problem anymore. 

Mac os 10.15.5

AE 17.1.1

[AljureAllure]

Same scenario for me, it is now September 2020 with a machine that normally eats After Effects for breakfast.. Like 3D scenes almost preview in real time on this thing, text however, well I suppose that is too much to ask for... C'mon adobe.

[mrdeerwhale]

I was having similar issues - it was extremely painful working with a surprisingly few number of Text layers in a simple scene with simple transform keyframes and no effects / no motion blur.  I ran a test on the same scene, but changed all the fonts to an Adobe font and the responsiveness went through the roof.  I then tried closing AE, then un-installing and re-installing the original font from the scene, and now AE is running much smoother.  If anybody is having similar issues, you. might try un-installing/re-installing the font to see if it does the trick.