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jefubbudu
jefubbudu
Inspiring
January 4, 2025
Question

Is it possible there could be some formal separation on this site between devs and user only forums?

  • January 4, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 1112 views

Is it possible there could be some formal separation on this site between devs and user only forums? A lot of replies here boil down to "this is a user only forum, don't expect adobe employees to help"... and then sometimes they just pop up and say "oh yeah we worked on that a little a while back" and leave, and honestly for a subscription, it's insulting that neither the support lines have been able to help me more than once from a dozen tries, nor have responses in forums worked to solve more than half of the serious issues I see brought up. 

 

Many discussions are about hardware choice or tips and tricks, or troubleshooting, but things like bug reports, asking adobe to support international standards, or answers to why certain parts were coded in certain ways or discuss alternatives to RAM preview, should be in a "developer response zone"  where devs can give context to why things are the way they are at least. 

 

I mean only the first 30 seconds of this. The stuff not about business practices, but about the state of adobe software in the minds of its users. I don't think the practice of silence only when someone mentions something that needs to be worked on is a functional community outreach method, nor does a lack of xontect or reason make it easier to accept suboptimal software.

 

We know it's slow. It runs like tar. Giving users a cold shoulder when they ask why the software they use to afford food is worse than a decade ago, is an easy way to come off as uncaring, or even malicious.

 

Mod note: third party link was removed. Moved to the Video Lounge.

      2 replies

      jefubbudu
      jefubbuduAuthor
      Inspiring
      January 4, 2025

      @Warren Heaton10841144 I am a VFX editor, and my computers are high core count, with small, hyperthreaded cores for simulations. As well, this is the 5th computer I have used adobe production software on. The best was CS3 on a school word processing computer with 4GB of ram, circa 2009. I then got my own computer with 8GB of vram in 2011, along with CS6. I was rendering 3D models in it by combining 6k textures on a 4k canvas, then incorporating greenscreen, and it ran fine. The second worst was on a school mac pro, on which the software crashed every 12 minutes, but was not always slow, in 2015 The worst was on a modern 2017 with 32GB of vram. I'm still using that one, partially because my employer watched me work remotely, and was fed up of paying me to wait for previews to load, and canceled every VFX shot, deciding it would not hit even imaginary deadlines. That is my experience

       

      I can render a cloud and simulate light propagation in blender using a raspberry pi, then output it as MP4 on 1GB of RAM, and bring it back into the software to edit as a video clip, including nuke-like node based VFX scripts. Modern After effects takes over 6000% as many resources at minimum spec. Software doesn't get slower if it's properly maintained. It gets faster.

       

      I think it's pretty telling that in my 15 years of using the software it's only gotten slower and laggier, faster than moore's law. In 5 years it'll be unusable, and as of 2 years ago it became totally unprofitable to use, and my director actively called it "trash software if it can't handle a layer group or 5"

       

      But more on topic, this entire situation is exactly why it's slow. Why was UI the focus, and not Deep image compositing? Was converting more effects to use GPU or be 16 bit not important? Why did the UI need to change? Who asked for it? Was there public outcry because it was too bright or dark before? Was it too fast, and needed to slow down? Were people asking for more dropdowns or a bigger, chunkier header? The people who decide what happens, what goes into it, what is worked on, how many workers need to do things... seem to be the businessmen, managers, marketing, and shareholders, not the devs or artists. That's the primary difference. If blender works so well with its devs not even knowing each other by name, and most being unpaid, Adobe has no excuse,  seeing as blender and After Effects are the same age, and are subject to the same kind of technical debt.

        Warren Heaton
        Community Expert
        Warren HeatonCommunity Expert
        Community Expert
        January 28, 2025

        @jefubbudu 

        Thanks for sharing your thoughts.  I think you've shared most of this several times in other threads.

        I used After Effects on a maxed out 2013 Mac Pro and a mid-range one for a pretty good length of time for broadcast motion design, from CS5 to CC2020.  Of those older versions, I think I'm most fond of CS6 followed by CC2014.  Although, I really came to appreciate being able to open the same AEP file in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.  I already miss that with 2023, 2024, and 2025.  Oh, and Content-aware Video Fill (I think that was CC2018) - nothing short of amazing.  I was freelancing at this one place where the project coordinator was dreading having to tell the client that none of the logo removal could be done.

        Issues of come up now and agian, but overall After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Media Encoder, and Cinema4D, all run pretty great on the 2013 Mac Pro, really well on the 2019, and extremely well an Apple Silicon.  When it come to the 2013 Mac pro, if I could go back and change anything, I'm pretty sure I'd pick the same hardware and same software.  That said, I worked with a pretty solid HP Z tower for awhile as well.  It was also a great workstation.  It was just really, really, really big.

        I still miss the classic Mac OS UI of After Effects from 1.0 to 6.5.  I strongly preferred the free floating windows.  I don't really miss having to render a movie to see your animation in real-time.  If you'd told then that today I'd be able to make adjustmetnts in an upstream Comp while watching the Preview loop in a downstream Comp, I would have told you that that's just crazy talk.

        When it comes to comparing After Effects to Blender, wouldn't it be more effective to consider using it with Blender?  I've used Blender a little bit, but that last thing I would want is for Ae to suddenly change from what it is now.  Blender supports ProRes via FFmpeg right?  The non-starter I would have right there is not being able to use something that is not an officially implementation of ProRes.  Any unlicesned anything is a non-starter for me professionally.


        jefubbudu
        jefubbuduAuthor
        Inspiring
        January 28, 2025

        Well, too bad, it has changed what it is now. It looks different, it feels different, the feedback for selecting things is different, its capabilities have grown in some areas, wasted away in others (rest in pieces rotovrush, if only you were as stable as in 2014, and built in mocha almost revolutionized compositing. Too bad that never panned out)

         

        Also, about Prores, that isn't their fault. I can link to the devtalk where we are actively discuasing ways to include it while still respecting licensing but it's brutal how obtuse their rules are. Even Davinci Resolve can't use Prores. That's why VFX artists grimace when they get it- Apple, oh wise and benevolent, tender to the walled garden, picks and chooses who is allowed to use it, to the point of micromanaging which platforms of which software are allowed to. This is why resolve only has that feature on IOS, and why VFX artists who do 3D like me swing toward DNXHD and EXR sequences, which are more robust simply because no company has significant control over their use or implementation. "Licensed" is not a vote of confidence, if you know what you're talking about. It's a warning that the developers are not in control of their own featureset. There is a reason VFX standards are built on open source.

         

        As for being "unprofessional" or "unlicensed", Blender is more aligned with the VFX Reference Platform and checks more of its standards than After Effects. Being licensed just means you suck up to a corporate entity. If you're not up to date with modern standards, your licenses don't mean dirt. There is a tracker for VFX software compatibility with the standard, including Nuke, Maya, Mari, Houdini, etc. After Effects advertises 3D capabilities. They're trying to play with the big boys here, and it's not gonna be pretty.

         

        Oh, and I did use it with blender, but its EXR workflow was anemic, compositing of EXR was slow, multilayer barely functioned, there were colorspace issues, transparency issues, gamma issues, 3d is largely nonfunction for IO, doesn't support volumes or standard materials so far as I know... and to top it all off you need a separate window just to manage a sequence. Abysmal in practice. I'll stick to resolve where you just apply a lut and your colorspace is good to go.

        Warren Heaton
        Community Expert
        Warren HeatonCommunity Expert
        Community Expert
        January 4, 2025

        @jefubbudu 

        As mentioned earlier in this support thread, not being able to change the theme UI color in After Effects is due to the change to Spectrum UI across the Adobe applications.

        This is the appropriate place to let the After Effects team know it's important.   As of Friday, January 3, 2024, we're at 20 votes.

        While issues come up now and again and my personal feature wish list is pretty long, I have seen very good improvements in After Effects over the past several versions.  I'm not sure why your experience is so poor by comparison.

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