[Tim Kurkoski]

Adriano,

Sorry to hear you’re experiencing these problems.

> Two days ago I had to go back to a project and AE started behaving in a weird way. Any time I delete something from the project or close a timeline I get a tortoise speed unnecessary auto-save. Some of them can get take as long as a minute.

We would like to take a look at your project to see if we can figure out what is happening. Could you send it to us?

Please contact me offline via email (kurkoski@adobe.com). Thanks!

[Tim Kurkoski]

There is a bug in After Effects CC 2017 where JPEG sequences are the wrong duration. This was not fixed in the 14.0.1 update; we are working on a fix for a future update. Our apologies for this bug.

What is happening is that when you save the project, the Interpret Footage > Frame Rate setting for the JPEG sequence is being reset to the frame rate value in Preferences > Import > Sequence Footage.

The preference value defaults to 30fps. For example, if you interpret a JPEG sequence as 25fps, and then the bug causes the value to reset to 30fps, the sequence will be only 83% (25/30 = 0.83) as long as expected.

There are a few different ways to work around this problem until we release a fix:
1. Set the Preferences > Import > Sequence Footage frame rate value to the value you wish to use. This makes sure that when the bug happens, the interpretation frame rate isn’t changed. This may not be convenient if you work with sequences of different frame rates.
2. When you import JPEG footage, in the Import dialog change the Enable option to “All Files” and the Format option to “JPEG” (instead of “ImporterJPEG”). This will avoid the problem.
3. For footage that you have already imported, use the File > Replace Footage > File command, follow #2 above, then change the interpret footage frame rate as desired (if you have not already done #1).
4. Use a different file format instead of JPEG, such as PNG or TIFF.
5. Use Time Stretch or Time Remapping to change the duration of footage already used in a comp. Time Stretch is simpler, just calculate the stretch factor between the two frame rates (in the example above, the stretch factor is 120%, or 30/25).

The reason this problem occurs is because After Effects CC 2017 now uses the same JPEG importer (“ImporterJPEG”) as Premiere Pro. There should be no difference in the rendered results, the difference is only in how the importer module code is wrapped; this change is a part of an internal project to reduce code redundancy between applications. The bug is in how the new code is wired into After Effects. The legacy JPEG importer (“JPEG”) is still available, and does not have the bug.

I hope that helps. Again, our apologies about the bug.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Hi Dave,

It is indeed a bummer, and our apologies for the disruptions.

We’re working on a solution for this. I’m not allowed to speak to a specific timeline, but we hope to have something available soon.

[Tim Kurkoski]

We are investigating this problem. It does appear to be related to communicating with the audio device.

If you change the audio device being used in Preferences > Audio Hardware, does the problem go away? We think it may be more likely to happen if you have a multi-channel capable device. If you switch to a stereo-only device (ex., internal speakers), this may be less likely to happen.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Tom, Michael, Bram,

Does your timeline have a lot of keyframes, or even just a lot of layers, visible when the problem occurs?

One of our developers is investigating a similar-sounding problem on this forum thread:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2231033

Does following his suggestions there, either minimizing or closing the Timeline panel, help with this problem? That helped for a user on that forum thread.

(I would appreciate if you would continue to post on that thread, which our developer is monitoring. I will be out of the office for an extended period soon and probably won’t be replying to this thread for the next couple of weeks.)

[Tim Kurkoski]

> May we assume that you’re aware that there’s no such thing as real-time playback in AE?

Dave, that’s at best misleading, and at worst completely false.

After Effects is designed to play back frames cached to RAM in real-time.

What tends to confuse this is:
– Bugs in recent releases of After Effects that cause real-time playback to not work consistently. With bug fixes in successive releases up to After Effects CC 2017, the remaining instances of these problems are fairly narrow, mostly macOS 10.11 and 10.12 with large screens. We are continuing to work on fixing this.
– After Effects is not designed to play back compositions in real-time _before_ the frames are cached to RAM*. While that can happen in certain cases, and the performance improvements made in recent releases actually make this more likely*, real-time playback is designed to occur once frames are cached to RAM.

* A major exception to this is an improvement in After Effects CC 2017, where many movie footage formats (QuickTime, MXF, H.264, etc.; but not image sequence formats like TIFF or EXR) can be played in real-time from disk, as long as no changes or effects or applied, and the overall machine performance and disk read speed allows this.

Saying that “there’s no such thing as real-time playback in AE” can mislead other people, especially those who don’t have as much experience with After Effects as you do.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Hi Michael,

A few questions:

* In the Audio Hardware preferences, what is Default Output set to? A screenshot really would help here.
* What version of macOS are you using?
* Are you experiencing any other playback issues in either After Effects CC 2017 or CC 2015.3?

And is there any chance you could share a project with us that exhibits the problem? I recognize that you said you could reproduce it rather easily, but we cannot reproduce with that basic description, so it may be something specific to the files or settings you are using. Always best if we could see exactly what you’re doing.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Sorry to hear you’re experiencing this problem.

Is this on Mac or Windows?

In Preferences > Audio Hardware, what are your settings? A screenshot would be useful here.

If you change this, does the buzzing, and/or the crash go away?

[Tim Kurkoski]

This is a bug in After Effects on macOS 10.12 Sierra. It does not affect 10.11 or earlier versions of macOS.

What appears to be happening is that when you press the Return key to rename, the line return character is also being placed in the keyboard buffer. Because After Effects selects the name of the layer/footage/effect/item when you press Return to rename, the line return character is replacing the highlighted text.

This is not obvious, and worse, if that item is referenced by an expression, the expression will be updated with the line break. This causes the expression to fail since the line break happens in the name string, and you can’t fix it without removing the line break from the name, since the line break is now a _required_ part of the name. (!)

This bug is fixed in the upcoming release of After Effects. Until then, we recommend you either:
A) Right-click on the item and choose Rename, instead of using the Return key.
B) Immediately after pressing Return to rename, press the Delete (backspace) key to delete the line break character.

While I’m on the topic of new bugs introduced into After Effects by macOS 10.12 Sierra, here are the others we are aware of:
– In the View menu, the Show Guides and Clear Guides commands are labeled as “Show Grid” and “Lock Guides”. (The existing Lock Guides and Show Grid commands are present; this is only a labeling problem with the Show Guides and Clear Guides commands.) Clicking on the commands still works, although the Show Guides command toggle state doesn’t work properly; we recommend you use the keyboard shortcut (Command+;) or the same command in the Grids and Guides Options button at the bottom of the Composition panel. Also, at the top of the View menu, a superfluous Show Tab Bar command appears, which does not work. (The forced addition of this Show Tab Bar command is what is causing the problem with the other commands.) In the upcoming release of After Effects, these bugs are fixed.
– Scrolling to zoom in the Composition, Layer, and Footage viewer panels is extremely sensitive on macOS 10.12 Sierra with Apple touch devices, like Apple’s Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad. This does not affect non-touch devices, like a mouse with a physical scroll wheel. We believe this is an OS-level problem, as many applications are reporting the same issue. We are continuing to investigate this, but have heard, anecdotally, that the 10.12.1 update (currently available as a beta) fixes this. (While investigating, we did take this opportunity to make a change: in the upcoming release of After Effects, inertia scrolling is now disabled when zooming in the viewer panels, which makes the scrolling experience much smoother on all versions of macOS.)

[Tim Kurkoski]

> One last question. In the future of AE, do you see Camera Raw as an effect? One of the best things in photoshop is layering the perspective repair tools. So atleast I use it a lot to tweak the look of photos/undistort.

Potentially, yes. The After Effects team has tossed that idea around before. Specifically, implementing individual components of Camera Raw as effects in in After Effects, which is easier to process than the entire Camera Raw plug-in as a single effect.

In fact, we’ve done some of this in the past, such as the Vibrance effect, which came from the Camera Raw code. (Although in that case the Photoshop team did the heavy lifting of extracting Vibrance into its own separate chunk of code.)