AE CC 2018 ridiculously slow

I've decided to use resolve for everything that isn't an adobe effect. it just works better. back in 2012 I could easily render 6K footage, experiment with 8K subcomps to drive more complex effects. Now 1080p is wishful thinking, and a single 2 point track takes hours to work on, even though my hardware is three times as fast as in 2012. absolutely unusable.

Lo and behold, it's 2022 and 2018 speeds feel like the dream for AE, though 2015 was the best for export and effect calcs. we had multithreading then, but it was removed because AE became too useful for a moment.

I can't do this any more. The only reason I have it now is that I'm getting all my old footage and edits exported so I can quit without losing a decade of work. hff. I'm gonna miss photoshop though. maybe I'll keep that one. there's still no very strong competitor, even though it's gotten slower too. I remember waterpaint in realtime back in 2014. good times.

If adobe dies, well, subscription complacency killed them. it's like that anime, psycho-pass. Addictive drugs to take away your stress, then you die because it turns out healthy people need stressors to function properly and not just go braindead. It doesn't take a genius to understand that you can't just make a product worse for a decade and expect to maintain a monopoly by shanking the competition with a rusty nail. Adobe went from scrappy upstart to indie king, then spent 2 years as a mature toolset, then went subscription and now it's a decrepit tool left to rust in the rain, and Adobe will charge you for the honor of watching it crumble in your hands. Heck, even adobe acrobat takes minutes to start, a handful of seconds to make a text box and typing in it isn't realtime. How do you mess up a text document processor?

I have Ryzen 5 3600

32 GB Ram

1660 Super

240GB SSD

and I feel like I'm running AE on Pentium 2.

I was literally cursing on my PC for the past 3-4 days but now I realized it's the problem with everyone. I hope we get a solution or good adobe competitor ASAP.

Mod note: Please do not post profanity. Comment removed. Be kind.

Same here in CC2019 and 2020.

Dragging a marquee, selecting a keyframe, moving a keyframe, moving the playhead are all stuttery lagfests.

The larger the AE window is, the worse the UI lag becomes and the more layers in the timeline multiplies the lag.

My assumption had been that it is to do with high PPI displays which would go some way as to explaining why the larger the AE app window is the worse it becomes. However, I have asked another animator using 4K monitors and they've got no such problem. So I have no idea what's going on. What I do know is that I do most of my AE work on my old iMac now which has no such problems (and is a retina screen too). I'd love a proper response from Adobe about this but its been years so I'm not holding my breath. I definitely won't be buying a PC again.

Hello. I also have these same unbearable problems.  I am working on a bare-bones project, using elements created inside After Effects, but EVERY MOVE I MAKE is laggy.  Just moving the cursor around.  I am working on a new machine, packed with RAM.  This is unacceptable.  

What is the remedy?  

I had this same issue in AE 2020, and the miracle fix for me was to turn off guides in the UI of After Effects.  Who knows the reason this happened other than to irritate me to the point of insanity, but fortunately I didn't have to reinstall everything.  Hopefully the same solution helps someone else.

I finally found a solution!

While setting up a new machine from scratch for work recently, I decided to give something different a try, it seems to have sorted all the major performance issues. So from a fresh install of MacOS or Windows, just before you install the Creative Cloud installer, stop there, *cancel your subscription, don't install any Adobe software ever again* and instead migrate to alternatives made by compaines whose livelihood depends on the quality of their products, not the maintenance of a rapidly decaying monopoly. It really is sad to watch, I've been using Adobe software since 1998, but the company is riddled with late-stage marketing cancer, save yourself the pain and jump ship, the alternatives perform so much better you'll genuinely laugh out loud.

I had the same issue. 

I solved this problem with:
Edit > Purge > All Memory & Disk Cache...

Try it and tell me if it works.

Did Adobe ever provide an answer for this? I'm having these issues on a top spec macbook pro 2019 with Mojave & AE 2020. Posted several times, even made a fxxing video so they could see the problem in action. Tried phoning them a billion times.

Unbelievably frustrating. 

after I had this problem for several days and nothing helped, the following worked: uninstall after effects with all default settings and reinstall without migrating data!

I know this sounds easy, but maybe one or the other hasn't tried it yet. I had every issue before: no playback possible, lack of performence etc.. Now everything is fine.

edit:
it worked for the playback, but when you work on 2 screens the performance is really slow. But the workflow with changing the HighDPI settings is still woking!

Hello Adobe.

I've had issues with performance of After effects preview from beginning of my Adobe Cloud purchase. That is since last black friday sale when I bought Adobe Cloud license. Most of the work I am doing is animating explainer animations with Ilustrator graphics so my entire projects are somewhere arround 500mb in size and everything is vector graphics. I have 32gb or ram, 4 cores and 8 threads wich I know is not a lot but it was enougn until I bought the license. With old versions I had no problems at all. But now I am really thinking of an alternative, because I am torturing my self with working in After effects. I've tryed different solutions from deticating Ae more ram (up to 20gb), reducing resolution, reducing preview quality, optimizing files from Ai, a lot... NOTHING WORKED! It is still a outrageously slow process.

Since I've read this doens't happen to all of Ae users. Can anyone (or Adobe support) please sugest a solution on how to fix this?