• Adobe After Effects

  After effects display optimizations

  Posted by Dominik Wojtarowicz on May 22, 2008 at 9:44 pm

  I’m sure everyone who works with other commercial compositing tools has noticed that after effects seems to be sluggish in many areas where other applications seem to just scream. Even older (and dead) applications such as commotion. For example drawing splines and moving them around feels a lot slower in after effects than even in photoshop. So is the panning of full screen windows.
  Photoshop as well as many applications such as monet, shake, commotion and others feel a lot more fluid when working on a single frame than after fx does.
  This is pretty easy to replicate on any computer, quad g5, 8 core intel mac pro’s, laptops. There is a visible “refresh” as a spline is being moved and manipulated you can observe. Does AE buffer a frame into vram at all and treat the splines as another layer ? Is that what some of the other apps including photoshop do to make this particular aspect of the application feel so much fluid ? This is not a HUGE difference i’m describing, but a difference that does get annoying when working with other applications side by side which don’t suffer from this problem.

  If anyone wants to observe this effect, open photoshop and after effects, and draw a spline using the pen tool with photoshop and then immediately jump into AE and do the same. The difference should be quite apparent.

  Some specialized roto tools that are plugins for after effects don’t suffer from this so i suspect adobe’s code for this particular aspect of the software is less than optimized ?

  Dominik Wojtarowicz replied 17 years, 12 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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