AE CC menu delay’s / footage not stepping…

[Todd Kopriva]

Yes, the delay when clicking menus is a known issue on Windows. We are working now on fixing this.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Steven Kutny]

Thanks for responding Todd, this is a big relief. Do you think the menu delays also tie in with the keyboard shortcut delays? In general, the use of any shortcut that jumps through the timeline is sluggish. Examples are “page up/page down” step throughs, or “J/K” commands to snap at key frames.

[Todd Kopriva]

Here’s what we know about the issue with slowness when clicking to open a menu or when using a keyboard shortcut. (We’re still digging, though, so it may turn out that some of this is incomplete or incorrect.)

Because of a change for After Effects CC (12.0) that shows the activated user in the menus, After Effects is checking a file on disk each time that menus are accessed. Because of the way that we implement keyboard shortcuts, this also means that the file is checked each time a keyboard shortcut is used.

On computers where disk access is slow (e.g., because the disk is slow, the bus is slow, or something else is reading from the disk at the same time), this simple check of a file can add a noticeable amount of time—maybe half a second or even a couple of seconds in some cases.

We are in the process of fixing this. It is my hope (but not a promise) that we’ll be able to have a good fix in place for the next update, which we’re targeting for September.

In the meantime, here’s how you should be able to mitigate the problem:
Make sure that your software is installed on the fastest disk that you have, preferably an SSD. If you don’t have an SSD, then at least make sure that your software (applications and OS) are not stored on the same drive from which you’re reading footage or to which you’re writing output files. And certainly don’t run applications with high disk access (like WinZip or anti-virus software that intervenes at every disk access, just for a couple of examples) while you are working with After Effects. (BTW, this is all good advice for high performance even without this bug.)

If you make these changes and notice an improvement, let us know. Actually, let us know either way so that we can collect more information.

So, how did this get past us? I think that it’s because we tend to test on computers that are set up as I describe above, including tending to use SSDs and having our disk access spread across multiple disks. That said, we do apologize for letting this get out and inconvenience you.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Jason Jantzen]

Just curious, but do any of you experiencing this sluggish behavior have Java installed on your machines? I seem to be experiencing something like this today and the ONLY difference between my machine Saturday and today is maybe something to do with Java since I installed that recently (which come to think of it may have been Friday, but AE’s been fine until this morning).

I have OS and apps only on a fast SSD (sata3 connection) and AE cache hooked up to another fast SSD with sata3. 3.2ghz 6 core CPU with 32gb of RAM and a GTX 680 GPU.

Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj

[Steven Kutny]

Hey Jason,

I uninstalled my Java after reading this, but unfortunately the problem still persists. Here’s a link to the main discussion on Adobe’s forum:

https://forums.adobe.com/message/5534970#5534970

Sounds like they’re getting close to a solution so fingers crossed!

[Jason Jantzen]

Thanks for sharing that thread. You know it’s weird. My machine only does this intermittently now. According to Todd, you want to have everything on fast disks, and preferably keeping your media on a separate drive. That’s actually all in the performance guidelines in the help doc. I have all that set up and don’t seem to have any problems, but once in awhile I experience delays (project size not related). I think it might be a driver thing, but who knows. My overall experience is just fine.

Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj

[Todd Kopriva]

I’ve just verified a fix for the problem with a delay when clicking to open a menu, so I can say with certainty that this fix will be coming in After Effects CC (12.1), which is due for release in mid-October:
https://bit.ly/AE_CC_12dot1_details

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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[Jason Jantzen]

Horray! Glad to hear it 😀 Thanks for keeping us informed, Todd.

Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj

[Todd Kopriva]

Try it now, in the updated version that we just released.

For complete details, see this page.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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