Adobe seeking feedback about panels, palettes, workspaces, and other UI elements

AE

ability to scroll through layer blending options (add, overlay, darken, ect) with the down/up arrow just like in PS. Im sick of manually mouse clicking through each of them.

(If this is a newbie thing and I should know the effect that each option bring than sorry but think of it from Adobe point of view, they should be making their programs accesible to new customers, while still catering for seasoned pro's of course.)

Some of the best UI features of Adobe apps are ones that are universally intuitive, like: Space Bar = Hand Tool/Pan.

Often what seems poor in one application is the lack of a feature you’re used to from another, eg. a ‘group’ command, history palette, UI brightness control etc.  I really think that for starters the following features could and should exist across all three of these applications (and possibly others):

AE:
Save Incremental
Any numerical (and colour) value can be scrubbed
Is effectively fullscreen by default
Gradient editor
Dialog boxes always ‘Preview’ by default

PS:
‘Smart’ Control/Options (horizontal) toolbar
Vertically collapsible palettes
History palette
Brush/tool size can be altered on-the-fly with ctrl-alt
Brush/tool size is represented by cursor size

AI:
Mini top-floating toolbars (Pen tool etc)
Content present outside the active area can be usefully viewed
Swatches palette

Keyboard shortcuts are a slightly different matter.  It would be lovely if they were all the same but in reality having P in AE be Pen tool instead of Position would be hard to justify.  But anything which can easily be unified, should.  Such as:

‘Hide application’ shortcut
Scale from centre shortcut (alt in AI/PS, Cmd in AE)
Exit editing text shortcut (esc or enter)

Illustrator definitely needs the most work, it could be so much more intuitive and natural feeling, I don’t know how real illustrators can stand it.  Across the board I also think the UI’s could be more user-configurable, possibly via HUD’s (think C4D or Apple Motion), looking again at the way palettes dock/collapse (I used to like the old InDesign where they collapsed horizontally to the screen’s edge like a draw),

Generally speaking I think a lot of the UI paradigms are outdated in the sense that the GFX cards and OS's are so much more powerful now than they were 10 years ago, screens are bigger, and workflows are faster.  Most of the time, the UI is the only thing that stops your thought-process from happening instantaneously.  With this in mind, I think Adobe could benefit from revisiting notions of the 'intuitive' and think about ways to get the UI out of the way of the creativity as much as possible. This might be ultimately difficult as long as Adobe thinks like a 'software company', but the new Photoshop iPad apps were a step in the right direction.  Would a closer partnership with Wacom be worth considering? Or even developing your own physical 'Toolbar' keypad with dynamic, configurable LED buttons.  Massive cliché warning: You have to think outside the box to innovate! Even simple features like a universal shortcut to temporarily horizontally flip the art (a trick traditional artists have used for centuries to check their compositional balance etc.) or an option for a larger colour picker/mixer palette with various modes are easy to imagine.

It would be nice:
Layers into folders
Multiple instances of palettes (effects & presets palette and effects controls palette)
Composition navigator under the image, or next to Adjust Exposure
Editable palettes with buttons (C4D is a great reference)

And I'll mention it, although it's more than a true interface issue - the ability to move elements around within the render pipeline is long overdue.  Not necessarily true nodal control, but why can't I render Layer Styles before effects?  Or Masks post-effects?  Because of their position in the render pipeline, I find Layer Styles virtually useless in most of my work, especially when motion blur is used.  The ability to simply drag layer properties into a customised order within the timeline would be an incredibly powerful capability.

Naturally, pre-composing is the way around this issue, but it makes things so much more cumbersome.

PPro cs5

At the very least, cntrl +/- to increase/decrease zoom on the timline and preview monitors. This is a fundamnetal shortcut in other programs why not premiere?

I second the need to update the whole title creation tool, can I not just have a text tool and drag out a box on the preview monitor? then I can change the text via the text pallet like in the other programs

AE cs5

I second someones elses suggestion here:

The ability to hide/group layers in the timeline, sometimes you just have too many layers and they should be grouped in a folder out of the way!

Thanks for enabling my creativety Adobe but when are you guys bringing out a true 3D program so I can create 3d objects to use in my PPro & AE movies?

(Again, I'm still in Premiere Pro 5. Will go to 5.5 soon.)

Premiere Pro titler should have “Save As.” Many times I start modifying a title design, but I’ve forgotten to hit “New Title based on current title.” I used to be able to “Save As” a new title.

Sometimes the effects in the Effects Panel don’t scroll down correctly. A good example is in Audio, Dynamics, or Audio, EQ. If I don’t have the Effects panel set really large, I’ll be looking at the custom settings, and as I get down to that effect’s bottom of the interface, it disappears before the bottom shows. It’s hard to describe, but if you play with those effects (show the UI “knobs”) and scroll down in the effect window, you’ll see what I mean.

BTW, I believe round “knobs” should never be on any interface, because they don’t translate well to mouse movements. “Sliders” are more intuitive.

In Premiere Pro, the Multicam Window, the Program Monitor, and/or the Reference Monitor should be able to run (with moving video) together at all times. I don’t know if the “one or the other” is because of my older video card. I’m getting a new Adobe-recommended (CUDA enabled) card soon, and I hope the monitors work together.

For instance, I can watch the Program Monitor and the scope at the same time, but the scope freezes until I pause the video.

In PPro, Time Remapping in Effects Controls is very hard to figure out. I would think there could be a key frame for the one speed, a key frame for a different speed, and a line or curve in between.

Your Temporal Interpretation for key frames, such as Linear, Bezier, Ease In/Out is very nice, and I use them all the time. But Time Remapping confuses me.

In Adobe Media Encoder, how about presets that group other presets together? For instance, I have a client who always likes to get WMVs and FLVs, and I like to make another version for Vimeo Thanks for those presets, BTW!). It would be nice to make a super-preset that I could name after my client, and when I click on it, my video would be queued up for WMV, FLV and H.264 in one step instead of three (or more, if you include finding the client’s favorite WMV, FLV and H.264 settings for each format). It would be listed as three encodes, of course.

In the Project Panel, Preview area, it would be nice to be able to make that a little bigger. You can make larger icons or thumbnails, but that little player in the upper right should have a bigger option.

In the source clip window, I’d like a button or some quick way to view the audio in a video clip. The Output button, with the list of all the options, is okay, but I thought there used to be one button to check audio.

How about some way to see video AND audio waveform at the same time (other than dropping it into a sequence).

In the Source Panel and Program Panel, there is a terrific little button to export a video frame. The options are: Name, Format and Path. But in older versions of Premiere Pro (3), I knew how to set the size, pixel aspect and deinterlacing. My client often asks for still frames, and it would be nice to not to have to go into Photoshop to make stills look right. (And I can never figure out how to convert pixel aspect ratios there anyway.)

I love Premiere Pro. Keep up the great work!

Is this the right place to post comments about Premiere Pro? I came here from http://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2011/06/adobe-seeking-feedback-about-panels-palettes-workspaces-and-other-ui-elements.html#comment-2847 but it says After Effects here.

I’m using Premiere Pro CS 5 (till I upgrade to 5.5 soon).

Premiere Pro Titler could use an update. It feels like the most stale part of Premiere.

Insert Logo should be Insert Graphic (since you renamed some things in 5.5).

There should be constrained scaling using percent. When I import a logo into the titler, it’s often larger than the titler window, and it’s very awkward to find the corner handles and drag down the size (holding shift to lock proportions, of course) to end up with the right sized logo, in the right aspect, that fits in the Title space.

There should be a way to set the default font, size and color for the text tool. (On a new porject, it defaults to the first font alphabetically, which I rarely use.) Just as I can set the sample text (AaBbZz) I want to start with, say, Ariel, 30 Pt., grey. Even the style gallery defaults to 100 pts. (for new projects, otherwise it does last used, which is fine).

Selecting fonts from a large list is tricky. If I type “A” it goes to the fonts that start with A, but if I type “Ar” it doesn’t narrow down the search (for Ariel) but it goes to the “R” fonts. And scrolling through many fonts is cumbersome, so I’d like it to be more like a font search, as in Word, etc. I type “Tim” and Times New Roman shows up. Also, like your filter search.

How about ‘Paste Attributes” for text boxes? The workaround for making text look just like other text is awkward.

I would love to see some key framing in the text tool. Especially for Leading. It would be more like the text tool in Flash.

I was just thinking yesterday about how great it would be in AE to be able to have multiple project windows or the ability to open and move folder contents into separate spaces in the UI. Similar to what the NLEs do. Its frustrating in a long list of assets to always have to scroll

After Effects:

The ability to expand the timeline view to include keyframes that are
out of range of the composition start and end frames.

A "previous" and "next" button in the keyframe Edit Value pop-up for toggling

through keyframes without exiting the Edit Value dialog box.

A timeline counter that actually counts time during RAM preview and playback.

The ability to specify an unlocked panel to always be on top of other unlocked panels.

The ability to force save a project if only an interface change has been made that
will be recalled when the project is re-loaded (i.e. expanding/collapsing layers,
currently displayed comp, etc.)
In fact, the Ctrl+S shortcut should always be operable (as in Pr).

Application Windows keyboard shortcuts that need
a three-stroke cycle to return to original position:

Ctrl+\ (backslash)
Resize application window or floating window to fit screen.
(Press again to resize window so that contents fill the screen.)
NEEDS: (Press again to return window to it's original position.)

Ctrl+Alt+\ (backslash)
Move application window or floating window to main monitor;
resize window to fit screen. (Press again to resize window
so that contents fill the screen.)
NEEDS: (Press again to return window to it's original position.)

I use Story, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition and Encore all the time.

Consistency troughout all the Adobe products (short cuts and maybe UI structure as much as possible) would be really great cause it would speed up the workflow and allow new users to increase their learning curve (I started out with AE and have still problems finding features in Photoshop or Illustrator)

A kind of group option (like the one in Photoshop) to organize many layers in AE would really be awesome. Of course right now we can precompose all these layers, but it's still a workaround and it is not always desirable to change compositions all the time.

A visual representation of a keyboard when changing/or searching for a specific short cut would also be a blessing (especially for Premiere Pro)

Also an improved 2monitor workspace with application fullscreen mode, like mocca has it, would be great. There is also a workaround right now but its one more workaround;-)

The option to easily share workspaces with co-workers..

A slider to choose how dark photoshop appears on screen like the one used in PP and AE.

I also use Blender for some simple 3D and Compositing work. There you can customize everything UI related color. Even tough I don't think it is good to change each and every buttons appearance I really like the ability to customize the Ui in the way I prefer to work with

For PP and AE i hope you will implement a true fullscreen view, without all the controll-items at the bottom of the screen. It would help to estimate cuts and timings even better without the need to use an external monitor (I think most of us don't have one available)

It would be nice to change higlighted values with the mouse wheel. much like in Nuke

How about adding something like the Media-Browser from PP or the Mini-Bridge from Photoshop into After Effects (maybe a hybrid of both) Together with an improved Imagesequenz Importer ;-)

You should add a visual representation of all the nested sequenzes and their relationship in pp. Much like the flowgraph or the miniflowgraph in ae