Had a really slow tedious day today and am looking for suggestions. After Effects (CS6) just gets really sluggish and unresponsive when working with big projects. Sometimes it can sit there for minutes, doing nothing, except spinning the stupid beach ball every few seconds.
For example - today I imported a maya scene. 30 seconds long, 1 camera and about 200 nulls. The nulls are static, so only the camera has keyframes. After Effects just sits there and stops, every mouse click prompting a beach ball that spins for a few seconds. Simply opening the file, selecting a few nulls and complying them into a new composition took about 40 minutes - it should have taken a few seconds.
Despite the tedium I tried several things to fix the dreadful performance and nothing worked.
The obvious things like quitting and reopening, and then trying rebooting, did nothing. Caps lock makes no difference - even though the scene is only nulls so there's nothing to preview anyway. Turning the layer visibility on and off also made no difference. I emptied all the caches in case it was a disk fragmentation issue. Ram didn't seem to be a problem, with the activity monitor reporting I had 3 gig free. I tried toggling the hardware acceleration on and off. Even turning off the visibility of the nulls in the view options made no difference. After Effects just sat there and beach balled constantly, even when I wasn't doing anything.
I converted the nulls to lights using David's script and the problem was the same - worse even.
This is very difficult to understand. There is nothing to render - no layers except nulls. All layers are turned off. The nulls are static and don't have keyframes. There are no hidden gotchas like motion blur, frame blending or depth of field. No plugins. Just 200 nulls and a camera and everything grinds to a halt. Even turning off the visibility of the lights and nulls makes no difference - so even with nothing to display After Effects is just sitting there and beach balling, taking a minute to respond to each mouse click.
If I delete most of the nulls / lights then performance will suddenly improve. It's like there's a hidden threshold for the number of nulls and lights After Effects can handle, and once you go over it the performance falls off a cliff. I have worked on compositions with almost 2000 layers - all with masks, effects and expressions applied, so I don't understand why a few nulls or some lights can practically break the application...
Any insight? Or even sympathy from those who've experienced similar things? It's driving me insane…
-Chris
