You hit the nail on the head, Peter. I recently started giving Premiere Pro CS5 a try, and was shocked by the amount of bugs and usability issues. I'm not even going as deep as you in the features, but the most glaring evidence of the lousy interface is that timecode offset bubble that appears everytime you move a clip in the timeline... the bugger appears just under your mouse pointer and won't go away, so if you try to just move a clip down a track quickly, and let go of the button ONTO the bubble, it acts as an obstacle and your drag/drop fails ! seriously, Adobe... don't tell me nobody has stumbled upon this one during beta-testing ? Ditto on the autosave that basicly interrupts anything you're doing. No background saving in 2011 ? At first it bothered me to no end so I disabled the autosave. And then a few hours later, Premiere crashed, and didn't even try to recover my work. I lost 2 hours of intricate work. I put autosave back on, and learned to endure the constant, annoying save dialog. And it's not like the save process is instant... even the simplest of projects takes 5 to 10 seconds to save... on an SSD... come on... let me work already... Of course, a headache-inducing implementation wouldn't be complete if the autosave didn't trigger even 30 seconds after a manual save. If I choose an interval of 5 minutes, just autosave 5 minutes after a manual save ! In thumbnail view, you can reorder the clips manually. It's all fine, but you can't reorder them by name or date or length, unless you switch to list view and of course, lose the thumbnails. Dragging and dropping a clip in thumbnail view is a chore, because the palette doesn't scroll when the mouse reaches the edge. You know, when you want to move something at the top all the way to the bottom... so you have to drag, let go, scroll one screen, drag, let go, scroll one screen... it's a joke. Even the timeline can do it. Heck, it's a software standard, nowadays. Renaming a clip and pressing ENTER takes you back to... the top of the folder !?! How many times I've renamed files that were at the end of the thumbnail view, and for each clip, I had to scroll back down. Time waster. Want to locate a clip from the timeline, in the project ? the locate function takes you to the folder. But not to the file, you have to navigate towards it manually. Ditto on the up/down arrows. I haven't found a way to jump from cut to cut like in FCP7. How often do I need to jump to the starting/ending points ? much less often than jumping to a nearby cut. How come I can't reorder filters in the effects pane ? sorry, I can actually reorder the filters... provided I take them from the bottom and move them up. Moving effects down doesn't work. It's driving me crazy. Conforming happens more or less anytime. Without reason. And even if the Media Cache is already full of conformed files. When moving the boundaries of the work area, no timecode/offset appears. You need to let go of the button and THEN hover, then you'll know the exact time/duration. Try scrolling up in the timeline, it scrolls to the left (which is stupid, it should scroll up). Now scroll up on the tabs of a palette : they scroll to the right !?! Can't select an active track. Direct consequence : copy-pasting a clip overlaps anything that's on track 1. Say I want to duplicate clips on the same track... I can't do it. Copy-pasting between projects doesn't keep the transitions, only the order of the clips. Have you tried doing a frame freeze on a reversed clip and setting proper in/out points for the freeze ? Good luck. "Duplicate" command, when you right click on a thumbnail, is way too far from the cut/copy/paste commands at the top, even though they're quite related. The other day I transcoded footage with different audio parameters. Just the audio had changed. Upon opening the project, Premiere wanted me to locate the files, which I did. And it failed miserably. Instead, I opened the project ignoring the missing files, and then re-linked them. I pointed Premiere at the first missing file, and had to confirm the replacement. Premiere saw all the other missing files in that folder, and began prompting me FOR EACH SINGLE FILE !!! two hundred and forty three of them, precisely. Can't I have a "yes to all" button in 2012 ? and why does the relinking work inside the project and not when you open a project ? That was just from 3 days with Premiere Pro CS5. I still can't believe it. Just to think people bashed Final Cut Pro X, praising Premiere in comparison... Sorry, but they both have serious issues. And Premiere doesn't even have the excuse of novelty.
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