"Pan behind Tool" and text editing are extreme slow and sluggish.

[miked81851938]

Folks,

I am experiencing an inconvenience that has grown too large to be ignored any further.

Since at least After Effects CC 2015 (13.6.0) I get sluggish and choppy feedback when using the Pan Behind Tool to adjust Anchor Points on any sort of layer (solid, footage, text, etc...) as well as when using the Type tool to edit text. Also, dragging a marker across the timeline gives me the same sort of choppiness in feedback. This leads to unwanted selections and results. It´s happening regardless of the complexity of the project, although larger projects tend to increase the slowness of feedback. (See my machines specs below)

I make this one thread, because I think those issues might be connected to each other, although I obviously have no clue about such things. Please let me know if I should make 3 different threads about that.

#Pan Behind Tool

When using the pan behind tool to manipulate anchor points, the little anchor point updates its position once or twice a second. That behavior leads to unwanted anchor point positions when I let go of the mouse button, otherwise I wouldn`t care about that too much.

#Type Tool

When editing Text - for example selecting specific chunks of text within a text layer - the same sluggish behavior leads to unwanted selections. I have no problem with text tools in other Adobe programs like Photoshop or Illustrator. This is using just the standard Windows fonts.

#Marker

When I drag a marker out of the little Comp marker bin that sits on the top right corner of the timeline - or when I try moving them at all, I get the same choppy behavior as explained above. Problem being that I frequently drop the marker on the wrong spot.

I have noticed that as soon as I use any one of these tools, one logical CPU core is totally maxed out and the others jump to about 10% (looking at the windows task manager).

I trashed my preferences.

I had the same issue on win 8.1 (running win 10 now)

I had the same issue using one instead of two graphic cards.

I have the same issue after a clean installation of After Effects.

I have the same issue after an installation of Windows 10 (upgrading from win 8.1).

I am updating NVIDIA drivers as they appear on my screen (pretty often, 2-3 times a month).

I used 3 different display setups (one 1920x1200, two 1920x1200 and two 3840x2160).

I have used all versions of After Effects since 13.6.0, all showed the same issue.

I think it was better before the Ae under-the-hood-architecture got overhauled.

I have seen this behavior on one other machine, similar to mine.

I am pretty happy with the overall performance of my machine and the After effects performance in general.

I assume that something is interfering with the rendering/updating/redrawing of the UI, but that`s just guessing.

I have also filed a bugreport, but I am not sure how much of a priority this thing is to Ae/Adobe, since I couldn`t find many reports like these online. Maybe I haven`t searched clever enough and someone can share this knowledge to me. I did find older and similar posts regarding UX/UI sluggishness, but none of them were about those tools, nor did they really help me fixing the problem.

Thanks for reading this far and hopefully putting me in the right direction.

cheers

michi

Software:

AE 14.1

Win 10 Home, 64bit, Version 1607

NVIDIA Driver 378.92

CUDA 8.0.0

Hardware:

Gigabyte X-99 Ud-4

Intel i7-5960x 3 GHz, running at 4 GHz

64GB RAM

1 NVIDIA 980, 4GB RAM (outputting to 2x UHD Displays via displayport)

1 NVIDIA 980ti, 6GB RAM

1 SSD Samsung 850 PRO 1TB (System)

1 SSD Samsung 850 PRO 1TB (Cache)

1 SSD Samsung 850 EVO 2TB (Data)

[Mylenium]

Turn off one of your graphics cards.

Mylenium

[miked81851938]

Thanks Mylenium,

but as I wrote I already tried that. Removing the card physically and disabling it in the hardware manager.

It seems as if this tasks are single threaded, as in just one logical core is handling the task and is completely maxed out by it. At least that is what all the single threaded tasks in Cinema4d are doing (like calculating cloth sims, which seems a little more complicated though than moving an anchor point...)

[Szalam]

It's really odd. I'm not experiencing issues like this, but my GPU setup is very different from yours too. Have you tried updating your GPU driver or downgrading it?

[miked81851938]

Hey Szalam,

since I regularly update my GPU drivers (2-3 times a month I reckon) and this is happening for over a year now, I have seen many updates failing to help me out there. So downgrading would mean using a pretty old driver that might jeopardize the proper use of the cards for other applications such as Octane renderer. Which I cannot afford to do right now, but maybe I have time to try out something "old" later this month, ha...

Thanks for taking the time man, really appreciated!

[Szalam]

Sounds really frustrating.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi MikeD,

Are you on the latest version (14.2) yet? If so, are you getting better performance now?

Thanks,
Kevin

[miked81851938]

Hey Kevin,

thanks for checking in.

I updated this morning but unfortunately to no avail. Same behaviour as before.

cheers

m

[Kevin-Monahan]

Sorry to hear that MikeD. At this stage, can you contact our agents? Ask for the Video Queue to ensure that your tech support rep is the correct one. Please return and let us know if they assisted you.

Thanks,
Kevin

[miked81851938]

Hey Kevin,

thanks for that suggestion. I reckon this will take some time that I unfortunately don`t have until august (its pretty busy right now and I don`t want to go on a bug hunt that might take a couple of hours)

But I will keep you posted, if a solution pops up along the way.

cheers

m

[P.M.B]

I've these problems since the same time.  Laggy pan behind, laggy text selection, waveforms vanishing on layer editing, temp files being put in the place, so many other tiny little annoyances..too many to keep track.  And those are just the ones I've run into

I've posted about them.  Can't really say if it's gotten any better or if I've just gotten used to it.

Please do come back and let me know what tech support was able to suggest, if anything.

Every fiber of my being tells me it's just the"whack-a-mole" inevitability of software that's unstable due to being in perpetual beta & continuing to have new code written on top of the already buggy, unstable, work in progress architecture.

It's absolutely maddening.

But what do I know. I suffer the delusion of optimists.

w10

gtx970

panel acceleration disabled ()

[FISIO]

This solution worked for me. In the character tools menu, I selected the reset character option. 

After changes it to a default one that already works properly. Changing to the selected font works much better.