Editor is slow

Symptoms

If one or more of these match what you are seeing, you are on the right page.

• •The canvas lags behind the cursor while dragging, but panels respond normally
• •The frame rate indicator in the transport bar sits well below the project frame rate
• •Playback stutters on first pass and is smooth on the second
• •The browser tab reports high memory use, or the fans spin up on a laptop

Causes and fixes

Ordered from most to least likely. Work down the list — each cause is paired with what to do about it.

1. 1

   Preview quality is set to Full on a composition too complex for realtime playback.

   Switch preview quality to Half or Quarter in the transport bar dropdown. This affects only the live canvas preview — export always renders at the full project resolution.

2. 2

   Too many elements require offscreen buffers.

   Non-Normal blend modes, blur effects, alpha masks, some distortion effects and isolated groups each need an intermediate framebuffer sized to the canvas. Right-click an element in the Layer Panel and choose Profile Element to see how many buffers it requires, then simplify the worst offenders.

3. 3

   Imported images are far larger than the size they render at.

   Every image occupies GPU texture memory at its source resolution regardless of display size — a 4096×4096 image costs roughly 64 MB whether it fills the canvas or a thumbnail. Resize images to their rendered dimensions before importing.

4. 4

   The work area has never been cached.

   Run Animation → Pre-render Preview to cache the frames in the work area before playing. Cached frames — shown by the green bar in the timeline ruler — play back at the full project frame rate regardless of composition complexity.

5. 5

   A long session has accumulated an unbounded undo history.

   Undo History Depth defaults to unlimited. On long sessions with complex projects, set a numeric cap in Edit → Preferences (Ctrl+,) to reduce memory pressure.

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