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To Adobe and the Members of the Adobe After Effects Team

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
December 20, 2016
4 replies
3833 views

I have been using After Effects since CS 5, a version I absolutely loved because it was solid, stable and rarely crashed and because of that, fun to work with. Your latest major release, After Effects CC 2017, is the exact opposite of stable. This is not new, all of the Creative Cloud (CC) releases have been buggy at best, fundamentally broken at worst upon initial release. The 2017 release, however, has been the worst by far. In my line of work, we create some pretty complex projects that older versions had no problem handling. But now I cross my fingers hoping After Effects did not crash overnight while rendering. This would be forgivable except any project file touched by 2017 is somehow 'tainted' so attempts to roll back to a previous version with the same project will start causing similar crashing issues in CC 2015

I am totally blown away that someone at Adobe looked at 14.0, saw it's functionality, said "f&#+ the customers" and greenlit it for release. Based on all the bugs and crashes I've seen both personally, from other people I work with and on forums, 2017 has at least 6 months of development and 6 months of testing before it is a viable software.

The AE platform isn't going to make you guys any money if you continue down this path. I'm telling you that you might actually cripple the software's reputation so badly that no one is going to use Adobe products. Nuke and other competing alternative softwares may be ridiculously expensive but at least they can render a shot without crashing all the time. I feel bad for the 10 software engineers who coded this and were forced to release this crap so early in it's development. Apparently, the Adobe executives got wild hairs up their — about only releasing new versions every 3 years. Instead of giving the mere 10 person AE team plenty of time to TEST and FIX the software bugs themselves on a rainbow of computer hardware configurations, you guys decided it would be best if the CUSTOMER tested the software in before it has even reached the beta phase and then release patches for it over the course of it's one year lifetime so you could release a new version every year like some crappy sports video game. The customers. The people who are not a quality control department! The people who basically rely on your software to eat and pay the bills!

People pay money for this, companies pay money for this. A lot more cumulatively than with the Creative Suite releases and the return on our investment is becoming increasingly not worth it. The only idea I have right now is to remove all versions from my system and re-install a solitary older, stable, tested by customers version of After Effects and not opening but IMPORTING my previous projects that were saved out of 2017 as CC13. At home, I have my own box that I built myself, happily running (and rendering) smoothly on AE CC 2015 and 2014. I would've been done with several of my projects from work weeks ago if I had taken them home to render.

Here is a small list of things that can (but not always) cause After Effects CC 2017 (14.0) to crash:

-Opening After Effects

-Closing After Effects (Error literally says "Stuff not in right order")

-Starting a RAM preview using the spacebar (Fixed in update but still worth mentioning)

-Stopping a RAM preview (Fixed in update but still worth mentioning)

-RAM previewing clips containing audio

-RAM previewing audio

-Having layers with keylight at the bottom of a layer stack vs the top

-Rendering

-Rendering with keylight

-Doing anything else on the computer while AE is rendering even if half of my 64GB of RAM is allocated

-Opening Preferences (Fixed in update but still worth mentioning)

-And my personal favorite: Absolutely nothing

P.S. After 5 years, your software is still unable to utilize high performance graphics cards that are recommended on your website.

Computer Specs:

-ASUS SABERTOOTH X99 LGA 2011-v3 Intel X99 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

-Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3 GHz LGA 2011-v3 Desktop Processor

-G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series (64GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 2400 (PC4 19200) Intel Z170 Platform

-PNY Quadro M4000 VCQM4000-PB 8GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 Full Height Workstation Video Card

-2 Samsung 1 TB + 2TB SSD Drives

-Windows 10 Pro

-Latest AE CC 2017 version as of 12/20/16 according to Creative Cloud desktop app

Moderator note: This is a warning. Please do not use profanity in your posts. It is against our community guidelines. Remember. There are those under 18 using our forums too, so please be respectful. Thank you.

This topic has been closed for replies.

C

cvid01

Inspiring

...and not everyone has the problems you seem to have. My system is not dissimilar from yours and I do not have the problems you do. Somehow your setup or other software may be interfering with your setup - just a thought. Ranting won't fix your problems and may make you feel good for the moment, but if you are an editor use what works. You don't have to stick with Adobe products.

Kevin J. Monahan Jr.

Community Manager

Thanks for your list of concerns, Robert. Please make sure that you forward them to the product team via the form mentioned. Here is the link. If it helps, I also forwarded this post to the team.

I remind you that these are troubleshooting forums. The location for off topic (or non-troubleshooting) posts is the Video Lounge. I will move your post there now. In the future, use this forum when you have a specific issue with After Effects, or you wish to help another with an issue.

Thanks so much,

Kevin

Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community and Engagement Strategist – Adobe Pro Video and Audio

Roei Tzoref

Legend

Oh our community ranter Dave LaRonde is going to LOVE you .

Bob I believe Op want's to rant and maybe start a discussion. This has a place here in the forums.

this is a painful, somewhat understandable critique of the software's situation over the past years and hopefully should be addressed officialy because as we all know, the Team does appear on the threads on occasion. my hope is that whatever comes up from this post will be focused on FACTS and not theories and speculations about Adobe's corporate management's intentions.

Dave_LaRonde

Inspiring

Roei Tzoref wrote:
my hope is that whatever comes up from this post will be focused on FACTS and not theories and speculations about Adobe's corporate management's intentions.

Well, that's the problem. The FACTS are a long-running litany of software malfunctions that appear in this forum day after day. So I have to ask myself, "WHY is this happening? It never used to be as bad as it is now."

Now, if you have some FACTS that can explain the "why", please present them. If you have none, where does this leave us? It leaves us no other recourse than to speculate why this is happening.

Roei Tzoref

Legend

Now, if you have some FACTS that can explain the "why", please present them. If you have none, where does this leave us? It leaves us no other recourse than to speculate why this is happening.

I don't understand how these assumptions get us anywhere. if this is just about blowing hot steam then fine, rant away.

I for one want answers from legitimate adobe representatives. if this thread will be just another one with the worn out "Corportate Weasels" metaphors Dave is copy pasting all over the web then I feel this would be missing an opportunity and missing the point.

when I say Facts I mean that in my opinion this should be focused on technical Facts:

1. Ae today vs Ae 10 years ago. what's broken, for how long?

2. the team is not 10 people, its more than 50 but why aren't there more people working on this software when it is so commonly used obviously and there are major issues to address?

3. more questions could appear here...

I think this should be taken seriously and written in serious tone. not disrespect, no weird metaphors but an open letter to the ones responsible for this software's condition in the past decade.

saying CC2017 is a useless app is simply not true. saying it has been useless since CC is not true. I have been working with this software daily and extensively for the past 13 years. teaching it for the past 4 and observing every other feature in CS6-CC2017 and getting feedback from hundreds of students about what works and what does not. working everyday at home, in various workplaces where it's installed on various platforms. I had crashes on 5.5 and I had crashes on 7.0 and I had preview problems with CS and we had useless features like Open GL that crashed and many many more. then there was the fact that it only used 2 GB or RAM until it became 64bit. I can't remember all the history but this software always had all kinds of issues. guess some feel nostalgic here and forget it was sometime a struggle with this software. so let's not pretend that Ae was fine and stable and perfect and then came subscription model and all went down hill.

sorry for being personal here but Dave has been answering every other complaint about the performance and even some features that would not work with "the software does not work as advertised", even when a user asks for something that was never supposed to work, spreading fallacies as if everything is broken. this is what it's come to: when you focus on complaining, on conspiracy theories and other imaginative speculations, when the director of the engineering team himself respectfully asks personally to talk to him and hear you out - and you respond with "No, Thanks" and a childish response, then all I can say is you don't really want to help make things better by giving a useful feedback, you just want to complain and that's unfortunate and a missed opportunity.

if this is some ranting movement of just saying nay to everything then fine but I want answers and I want users here to get serious answers to serious questions from the ones involved with this software's development. if we keep this serious and to the point, there's a chance this might happen.

Peru Bob

Community Expert

You are not addressing Adobe here. This is a user to user forum. Please make your suggestions here:

Feature Request/Bug Report Form

BartonGarrett256

Inspiring

In a previous life I was a product manager in life sciences. If the engineers working on my product line were not starting or ending their days perusing customer forums they would be taken to the woodshed, once or twice. If it happened a lot they were encouraged to find other work. So your post is akin more or less to the old question when did you stop beating your wife. If the people writing and testing the product are not reading these comments there really is no hope.

The other thing I learned in development is teams know how good their products are. Always. It's commercial pressure and bean counter decision making that releases products early. Every time. And anyone who thinks a corporation can get ten products done and tested at the same quality level on the same deadline has been drinking too much Koolaid.

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