Long story short, I started working on some custom tooling for AfterEffects and Premeire using a combination of ExtendScript and UXP, now most of that lives in the browser (outside of Adobe Apps entirely) and I am really happy with the outcome!
With my first pass integrating with Adobe apps I got things working right away, which was great. The problem was with production-level workloads I ran into memory leaks, bugs and major performance issues.
For example, my ExtendScript utility that renders animated captions takes 10-20 minutes to generate a composition (that’s not even the final rendering!). Rendering the same H.264 overlay video in the browser takes a minute or two.
My rendering task is very simple, it only took me a few hours to port my ExtendScript animated captions AfterEffects code to browser-based rendering using canvas-based rendering and MediaBunny.
Of course, my use case is for videos up to 4K being delivered as streaming video and on social media so this might not be a target that Adobe customers want to see in AfterEffects and Premiere.
Mainly, I am frustrated that I am a paid customer of AfterEffects and Premiere and neither were up to the task for what I wanted to do. When using the apps, dragging panels around and opening projects, the UI feels more sluggish and janky than I ever remember it being.
I’ve been doing time-based imaging (Flash, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, etc) since the 1990’s and I’d love to see UX performance standards return to that time period.
All that said, I do plan on continuing to use AfterEffects for simple MOGRTS and animations that aren’t procedurally generated. It’s powerful and easy to get good results quickly for basic jobs.