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Participant
February 16, 2023
Open for Voting

Premiere Pro's user interface is in dire need of modernization

  • February 16, 2023
  • 0 replies
  • 107 views

Adobe, it is long past time that this software's user interface get an overhaul, instead of simply adding new features each version. Other competitor's software has many modernization features that are lacking in Premiere Pro but add to their usability.

 

I have collected a list of several issues which I think could be addressed as a starting point.

 

  • Continuous background autosaving that doesn't intterupt my workflow with a message and progress bar every few minutes.
  • Performance of the user interface seems tied to the back-end or bottlenecked in a way that doesn't reflect my computer's performance. I have worked on both high-end workstations and low-grade laptops, and oftentimes the simple act of clicking and draggin a clip, or extending/trimming a clip, in the timeline slows down the display update rate so that the timeline's display is refereshed maybe once every half-second. It is extremely frustrating when making small but critical adjustments in the timeline. I am not a computer novice, have a high-performance computer, caching set up correctly, excess ram, and everything set to ensure Premiere Pro is running as smoothly as it can be, and user interface refresh rate is a major issue.
  • There is no way to disable the message box, "This action will delete existing keyframes. Do you wish to continue" - I can just press undo!
  • Many actions performed on clips can only be done to one clip at a time, while others can be performed on several selected clips at once. For instance, the context menu option to a hold-frame is greyed out if multiple clips are selected.
  • Many panels, most notably the essential graphics panel, are not able to auto-fit their size to the screen space available for them but are instead frequently partially hidden, with buttons aligned to the bottom of the panel being only accessable by mouse-scrolling or a scrollbar. Stacked panel groups are also often partially hidden, with tabs cut off on the top and bottom and an additional vertical scrollbar being shown. Sometimes multiple sliders next to each other. Perhaps this is a hold-out from when many users had 1080p monitors, but it remains an issue for people even with 4k monitors.
  • The timeline panel's display of time units at the top of the panel is non-sensical when working with sequences in uneven timebases such as 23.976. Time codes such as "00:01:59:21" could be rounded to something more readable.

 

I don't mean for this post to sound like I'm ragging on the developers, I'm sure there's options I've missed for some of them. It seems like over the years I've used Premiere, Adobe has added numerous new features, e.g. essential graphics, speech-to-text, auto-reframing, etc. All of these are wonderful and appreciated, but a lot of the core functionality of the software is really starting to show tremendous age.