AE CC 2018 ridiculously slow

[niklas.alden]

Seriously, what is wrong with AE CC 2018!?

I'm on an absolute beast of a workstation, a HP Z840 with 128 GB RAM, dual Titan X:s and so forth, but I can't even preview a simple text animation!

It takes forever to preview, and playback tops out at about 10 fps... I've got nothing in the timeline but animated text, no other graphics, no video, nothing.

And it's not only the preview that's messed up, the entire interface is laggy, when I move the cursor in the timeline sometimes it takes like a second for it to catch up.

Everything I try to do, import a file, keyframe an object, add an effect to something, and so on, takes forever.

I've done restarts, checked nvidia drivers, purged all memory and disk cache, cleaned database an cache, everything you could ever think of, but it's still painfully slow.

I never had these problems in cc 2017, it ran like a dream.

I'm at a point where it is virtually imposible to work, and it's making me a bit frustrated to say the least.

Don't tell me I have to downgrade to be able to work, that would just be, well, silly.

Why on earth would anybody release a version this unstable?

[ericwolf321]

What a joke. An Adobe staff member is asking a paying customer to contact Adobe Support. Novel idea: why doesn't the Adobe Staff member do some legwork here and try to facilitate solutions/ answers?

Is there something I am missing here?

[P.M.B]

ericwolf321  wrote

Is there something I am missing here?

Yes, there is  Not everyone who works for Adobe are tech support experts.  Hope that helps.

[ericwolf321]

Sorry I wasn't more clear - making my post seem obtuse.

I am not asking the moderator or whatever to provide support directly. But instead, forward the issue himself/ herself to tech support directly to facilitate the process.

This whole sluggish AE thing is really aggravating...it's super late and it's running in molasses.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hello ericwolf,

What a joke. An Adobe staff member is asking a paying customer to contact Adobe Support.

Sorry, you sound frustrated. We're doing our best here.

With some cases, 1-1 support is a better idea than triaging issues over the forum. In other cases, we do solve issues directly here. Filing a case with support has the benefit of generating a support ticket, which can be tracked and followed up on. A forum post is for general assistance that is mainly solved by other users with occasional help from Adobe employees like myself. I'm not sure how new you are to these forums, but my asking a customer to file a case with our agents is certainly nothing new. Sorry if you don't agree with our system of support.

why doesn't the Adobe Staff member do some legwork here and try to facilitate solutions/ answers? Is there something I am missing here?

I answer dozens if not hundreds of questions per day. Sometimes I can assist, and sometimes I need the help of my colleagues, depending on the situation. Please try and understand that I cannot triage every single issue that comes across these forums. I'm only a person. Thank you for understanding.

Kind Regards,

Kevin

[bevlak]

could one of you try and answer the question this thread is asking then? i really need to know whats going on here and if there is an end in sight for these UI and crashing issues??

[Kevin-Monahan]

Dear Bevlak,

I apologize for the issues you're having.

could one of you try and answer the question this thread is asking then?

This issue does not happen to everyone, so that's why it's difficult to troubleshoot. I spent a couple of hours today on a creative project and had no issues with performance. I was on an underpowered MacBook Pro, however. A lot of fun, actually.

You say you're having the same issues as the OP? He didn't mention crashing, but you just did. Do you have a crash report you can share with me? 

It looks as though my PC is similar to yours (i7/NVIDIA 32 GB RAM/WIN10), but it's currently mothballed since I just moved desks. Let me test it out for performance when I get back into the office in the morning. I'll review your posts and will check if there are any known issues or current bugs filed too.

BTW, have you filed a case with our support agents yet? They're open at 7AM PST.

Really hope I can help. Sorry for those on the thread also experiencing this issue.

Thanks,

Kevin

[Kevin-Monahan]

Bevlak,

I got my PC up and running with new drivers for my NVIDIA Quadro K2200. I started a new project with some still images I had exported from Lightroom CC. I experienced horrible performance from the get go, seemingly affirming the issue. Then, I exported similar images to the C drive. I had no problem then. I suspect that my scratch disk (E drive) is somehow corrupt or not functioning correctly. You might try moving the media to another drive and perform a similar sanity test.

I will ask engineering to take a look at the thread to see if they might have heard something about this issue.

I hope we can solve this issue for everyone.

Thanks,
Kevin

[aimeem21496341]

I know, it seems ridiculous. But I actually had the same issue until just now and it's fixed because I got onto them on live chat. I gave them remote access and they sorted everything out. After hours and googling and being frustrated and angry, I wish I did it sooner.

[jonb44766868]

I hate to say it, but it does sound ridiculous, and yet I'm sufficiently desperate at this point to try anything, even Adobe's technical support.

[jonb44766868]

I would be interested to know what they told you. I've just gone back to AE CC 15. It's not very fast, but it is very stable. At least I can get some work done.

[aimeem21496341]

They renamed some folder in Programme files. It's stopped working now though and is back in slug mode... I have it working on 2 machines. My old machine is totally fine and scrubbing away. It's the new and supposedly better computer that I'm having a hard time with

[darionLeigh333]

Can I ask what operating systems the two computers are running and their spec? I am trying to piece together a map of what hardware and software works and what doesn't

[FlashInPan]

What's funny is that when you go through the process of seeking tech support, You spend about 30 minutes following a trail, that ultimately leads you right back here.

[markrpigott]

I am still running 2017 everything and I find it takes minutes to load a simple 10 second 20 layer comp.

It is just a multilayered psd. Daresn't I "upgrade" to 2019.

I thought newer software was always faster! (puts on ironic face)

[FlashInPan]

I'm running both versions. I originally upgraded, then realized how terrible the new version was. I went back into the creative cloud menu, clicked the little dropdown next to AE and it allowed me to install the old version too. So, that's what I would do if I were you.

[Szalam]

I'd suggest installing both CC 2018 and CC 2019 in addition to your current version. It doesn't hurt anything to have them all installed together. I prefer working in the latest version, but, if you're having issues with it, dropping back a version can be helpful.

[Sammy3]

did downgrading work? Same issue scene is super slow, UI unresponsive halfway into a a working project. RAM preview fires us super slow after like 10 minutes after i click the playhead

[bevlak]

I am. It's Insane. Totally unusable

[Joolsd]

After effects isn't an Editing program. It is dreadful at long timelines. Out of interest have you tried importing after effects comps into Pr?

It means going between two programs but is Pr a better way of editing? Does this render real time?

[Theodoros Tziatzios]

A few major releases back, Adobe changed how the previews work and how the interface is redrawn.

I'm guessing this was done on one hand to enable After Effects to be more responsive (real-time) in previewing the timeline

and on the other hand, make the UI compatible with higher monitor (4K) resolutions, deal with OS scaling issues etc.

This decision was catastrophic for pro users. We couldn't care less for real-time previewing because 90% of the time

we deal with small durations (from 10 to 30 seconds projects) with hundreds of layers. I personally don't mind waiting for a timeline to preview but when it's done caching the frames on RAM, playback should be rock solid, like on previous versions of After Effects. On newer versions, the RAM cached playback on a loop, is inconsistent at best.

Also, the UI redrawing solution that was implemented is significantly slower. I am a script developer and I experience this everyday. Scripts run on After Effect v12.2, draw shapes instantly and interaction is smooth and fluid. On After Effects v15.1.1 shapes draw slower and interaction is sluggish at best. (This of course applies to any kind of layer AV, shape, solid etc.)

Previewing a timeline with several layers is unusable (on a Z820 with 128GB Ram and HP Z Turbo Drives).

One solution that I use to preview comps correctly, is to precompose the whole timeline so I only have one layer in the timeline but this a laughable workaround.

Already in this forum, there are numerous threads about how slow newer AFX versions are. The proposed solutions to work on half-resolutions or precompose, or suggestions not work with too many layers are a disappointment for pro users.

What adobe and every developer need to understand is that all these complaints about speed and sluggish behavior isn't something that we can't test immediately and everyday on our machines. Everyone can just fire up CC2014 and then fire up the same exact project on v15 and see the difference. It's there. On the same machine. It's not the RAM, its not the OS or some hardware quirk or some magic setting in the preferences. It's the software. It's After Effects itself. Adobe should take complaints from users who have invested 10-20K on hardware like niklas.alden and other pro users a bit more seriously.

I understand that newer solutions on a software need time to mature and tweak, but time passes, new versions of AFX are coming out and these new solutions fail miserably to deliver on what they were expected to deliver. If a new technology doesn't deliver on a specific amount of time, it's better to admit it, take a step back and reevaluate than to dump a s*it load of developer hours to brute-force it to work with mediocre results.

Let us hope the next version of After Effects (v16 ? I've lost track...) is better.

Myself and many pro users are on "one last chance" before we drop After Effects for something else.

I'm sorry for the angry tone of my post. After Effects is a tool that we have invested in for so many years and it brings us a great sense of disappointment, experiencing all these wrong development decisions affecting our work.

Theodoros Tziatzios

[rlmilton]

Amen...  sooo frustrating, for sooo long now.  Is anyone at Adobe listening to THIS??

[PGZ@Mobibase]

Hi, did you try developer mode ?

I saw somewhere that this kind of trick does not work on latest versions, but I have to say, I did it last year on a similar rig as yours, and all is going really smooth on it.....

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tQLH0QGGpDk

All cores are synchronised, average of 50 to 80 GB of RAM (out of 128) are used by AE, GTX 180ti used and maxed out -only- when needed, raid ssd's caching like a charm.

Only thing, I'm not on the latest AE version....just the last "stable" one which fits my system.

Maybe give it a try ?

Hope this helps

[daddyoktm]

Stick with 2014.  It’s easily 10xs faster in multiproccer mode if you have enough ram.  Since that version it doesn’t seem AE has been truly multithreaded on the rendering as you can see from the activity monitor when it’s rendering.

[Theodoros Tziatzios]

Here is a small part of the updates After Effects has gone through:

• .
• ..
• ...
• CC 2014.0 (13.0)
• CC 2014.1 (13.1) - Support for High-DPI (4K-5K monitors) implemented
• CC 2014.2 (13.2)
• CC 2015.0 (13.5) - Re-architecture of code - Multiprocessing removed, everything gone downhill...
• CC 2015.1 (13.6)
• CC 2015.2 (13.7)
• CC 2015.3 (13.8.1)
• ...
• ..
• .

We work on 4K DCI monitors. Versions of After Effects from v13.1 and older, are unable to scale correctly on High-DPI monitors and are pretty much unusable. So if we would want to keep high-dpi support along with multi-processing we must install the sweet-spot version of After Effects, which is CC2014 (v13) but update it only up to v13.2.0.49

Good luck doing that with the Creative Cloud app!

Of course working with such old versions, you forget about Lumetri scopes (added on CC 2017 - v14.2) and a few good things that newer versions of AFX actually have.

[XerachCruz]

The same here.

I come from CC2014 that was worked perfectly, I have updated in half of the project because some .mxf files not recogniced by CC2014... and now with CC2018 all is very very slower in comparison. Every time I make a mask I have to move the mouse slowly so that the After does not throw me points far away because refresh the interface very slow. The whole program is much slower in everything, with the same equipment and the same project ... I regret have updated.

I work on a Intel 6/12 core 64GB RAM and GTX TITAN, it's a computer more that enough for the project in which I'm working, only with two layers of 4K video and some solids with masks.