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.

[Drazzamatazz]

I was having this very same issue - one text layer - the only animation was an opacity shift over 5 frames.  No movement - nothing.  I followed your advice, but also to note:  Teh font I uninstalled was a .TTF font, and I installed the .OTF instead.  Problem solved.  So whether it was a problem with the installation of the original font, or a problem with the .ttf font file, or whether it's that AE prefers .OTF fonts, i don't know - but one of those things is no doubt true.

[Deperson]

thank you Drazzamatazz

I confirm this, installing .OTF will drastically speedup the render time.

[thegreatlazlo]

I just encountered this problem in a very strange way. I was given a lower-thirds project file (which I cannot confirm what version it was created in, but it had to be converted to CC2020 upon opening). Super simple project, only a name and a title, two lines. My AE was craaaawling. Everything was lagging, not just editing the text, but also switching tools, drop-down menus, everything. I tried switching gpu on and off, no effect. I tried, typing in new text, no effect. I was stumped.

Until... out of desperation, I decided to re-make the provided animation from scratch. Same project, but new comp. I add my new text, same font. Works perfectly! But if I copy the text layer from the old comp into the new comp, it all freezes up again! Weird, right? So whatever problem is occuring in this case, I do know that it's not the computer/gpu, it's not the font itself, it's not the project, and it's not the comp itself. Changing the text doesn't help (as in typing in new text), but here's what does fix it: If I change the font of the text (must change fonts of all culprit text layers), everything works again! And if I then change the fonts back to their original font, it still works! I'm no programmer, but it would appear that there is some sort of issue with the layer retaining a bad linkage or reference to the font file. And so changing the font breaks that link and forces it to update the layer to the correct "path".

Anyway, that was my experience. Not sure if that is the same problem as others, but maybe it can provide some clues to the underlying issue.

[mickwalkerboxset]

I just had a very similar experience and managed to solve it!

I was animating one line of text and it was causing my system to run very slow and renders were painfully slow too. Turns out, it was a new font that I installed on Windows, HOWEVER I installed the same font multiple times by accident!

I presumed that when installing fonts, Windows would say 'you already have this installed', but it didn't. So it had been on my system in 3 different places and must have been confusing the Adobe applications.

So I checked through the fonts in settings, and it was there - the same font duplicated 3 times. Clicked uninstall twice and running much better now!

[dwts]

I bought a new iMac 10 days ago. I have been having the same problem for 10 days. I was planning to return the iMac tomorrow.

I came across this post today and read its solution. Thanks to you my friend. Thank you very much indeed.

You are a wonderful person. 🙂

[kidskwid]

I know this is an old post, but I just wanted to say this: I was close to pulling hairs with AE. I had a very basic comp, animating only a shape and static text. It was worse than my 10 year old PC. But it was the font I was using. For some reason it was slowing everything down to unworkable levels. I changed the font accross all my comps and it was fine. 

The font in question was a 'print' style eroded font, so perhaps it had a lot of nodes/points for AE to render?

[Mr. Cow_Juan Pablo V]

I might be late for the party, but I am almost sure what the problem is because I had the same issue before. IT'S THE FONT.

Case:

I installed a new font from a demo version. After being approved by the client, I bought the font and installed the complete version, so I needed to change all fonts. (Also, I use Overlord to import from AI to AE to keep design format) This is important because it was part of the problem.

Solution(s):

-Try using a bolder or lighter version of the font (After this, you could clear your ram and cache for an extra clean, and then try to go back to the desired font style)

-Retype the whole text in Arial and then change it to the desired font (You could also try this step backward, play a little bit with it)

-Last resource: Create shapes from text

Hope this helps!

Note: Latest versions of After Effects (I'm on 22.2) have the render time pane. When the solution worked, it went from 35ms to 1ms.

[Wallroff]

This post by Fede0D4D on this link solved all my text-rendering problems. Give it a try:
„I was having the same problem. M1 Mac. I fixed it by going to the Font Book app, right click in the font and choosing "resolve duplicates". Now everything is fast again!“

[jonathan2775950]

Thanks Wallroff! I had the same issue, but deleting the duplicate fixed it. There was no option "resolve duplicates" in my Font Book, so I right clicked on the font and chose "show in finder". In the hidden folder "Library" > "Fonts" there were two filetypes of the same font (otf and ttf). After deleting one of them I had no more rendering problems with text layers in this font.