Menus are disabled and Render Queue window is open in After Effects

Learn what causes menus to be dimmed in After Effects and how to resolve the issue.

When you launch Adobe After Effects, most menu items are dimmed, and the only open panel is the Render Queue, which is full screen.

Reasons

You have launched After Effects in the After Effects Render Engine mode by doing one of the following:

• You selected the After Effects Render Engine icon instead of the normal After Effects application icon.
• There is a file named ae_render_only_node.txt in your documents folder as described in this article.

Solution

To resolve the problem, either launch After Effects using the normal application icon or remove instances of the ae_render_only_node.txt file.

Additional information

The ae_render_only_node.txt file can be in one of the following locations:

• macOS:
  • /Users/[user name]/Documents/
  • /Users/Shared/Adobe/
• Windows:
  • C:\Users\[user name]\Documents
  • C:\Users\Public\Documents\Adobe