Egregious AE UI Performance with 3rd Party Scripts

[RyanTScott]

Greetings all and thanks for reading. Over the last few releases of AE the performance of 3rd party scripts has been degrading to the point that they are barely useable. Typically this presents as a painfull spinning cursor icon after interacting with any given UI button on a 3rd party script and the multiplication of these wait times throughout the day produces a significant loss of productivity. This is disapointing in that I, like many other AE artists out there, have developed my own uniqie workflow by employing these 3rd party scripts to address UI functionality that AE simply does not natively afford. In the past my attempts to resolve issues with 3rd party scripts has been met with furstratingly hands-off responses from Adobe support. This laissez-faire attitude was tolerable at that time because, at least for me, the majority of the other scripts I used still worked fine. This is no longer the case. I understand Adobe's stance regarding this issue, however given that there are basically no alternatives to AE for me to turn to I'm left with simple groveling. AE developers please resolve this issue. Please. The fact that there's an entire sub-economy (read aescripts.com) dedicated to addressing functionality that AE lacks should, in the very least, point development in the areas it should be going. Content aware fill is cute and clever and all but I would much rather have the ability to natively interact with multiple timeline keyframes and/or layers in a powerfull and iterative way (read Lazy, Rift, Sortie, etc), the ability to natively interact with keyframe easing that doesn't involve switching to the graph editor (read, Motion, Easy, Flow, etc.), the ability to save and load colors from a pallette (read Ray Dynamic Color & Swatcharro) that doesn't crash AE (read Adobe Color Themes), and the list could go on. To sum this little rant, please just make AE better. Make aescripts.com unessescary. Be better. 

Now for my actual support issue and request. Why do scripts that used to work just fine no longer do so and is there anything I can do to alleviate this? As I've said before, interacting with UI buttons is painfully slow and this seems to have gotten worst with the last few releases of AE. It also gets worst the heavier projects get which is unavoidable. I've attached a screenshot of my current workspace which should tell you what 3rd party scripts I have loaded. Please see my system specs below:

Threadripper 1950x

64GB RAM

GTX1080ti

2gb SSD project drive

512GB nVME cache drive

thanks,

Ryan

[RyanTScott]

I forgot to mention that I'm also currently running v17.05 Build 16 and am currently in the middle of a project...

[Martin_Ritter]

I'm using a lot of scripts, too, on a daily basis. Scripts do work fine (Motion3, Lazy, DuIK, AnimationComposer, just to name some of the more heavier ones). I cannot confirm, that they start to lag with every update of AE. 

This lead me to the question: are your scripts up to date?

And have you made a clean install (with Adobe remover) of After Effects and the scripts?

Also, only the latest and largest AMD CPUs can beat an Intel CPU in AE. The performance of a Threadripper 1950x is below an average Intel i7. Your hardware configuration is not optimized to After Effects.

*Martin

[RyanTScott]

Hey Martin thanks for the reply and I think that, by the by, you're basically right. It stings too becuase I unfortunately fell victim to the TR hype back in 2017 and have been paying for it ever since. Looking back though it was inevitibal as I was sorely due for a workstation upgrade at that time. I also due a fair ammount of C4D and GPU rendering work and given that TR supported 64 PCIe lanes the hype made sense at the time. And here we are. Currently looking at components on Newegg...

[Martin_Ritter]

TR in general is a great cpu and many modern high-end software are running just fine on a TR. But AE is picky for a thousend reasons and non of one is our fault (expect using AE at all 🙂 ).

Make a clean install, go to the source pages of your scripts and download the latest versions and see if they are running better.

If you are after a new workstation, have a look at pugetsystems. They test hardware against AE, so you get a good overview to recommended models:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/all_articles.php?filter[]=After%20Effects

*Martin

[RyanTScott]

Thanks again for the feedback Martin and I'm aware of all of it already. After some more poking around this morning I think that the TR, gtx1080 & Adobe CC combo is basically just bad...