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

I'd love to see Photoshop's History palette replicated in After Effects.

It would be great if the UI elements available for scripting would be more similar to the elements used in the application itself.

For entering numbers, for example, I can only use text boxes in the scripting UI, whereas inside AE you have the more compact UI elements that just show the numbers and that you can click and drag to in/decrease or click on to replace.

I think Adobe must clean all the UI, less un useful option out, but with option to added or customize your own tools sets. I think there is a very inconsistencies in the suite, like Photoshop does not have the same UI than AE than Illustrator for example.

But look to the UI in illustrator is insane bad organized, it looks very old. In general for me the feeling is that each program is done by a different group of people that don’t communicate between the groups.

Illustrator have a lot of obscure tools like invert (flip) in a menu! Thats not the way.

Adobe for me needs urgently a rearrange of all the suite of tools,to be consistent with the same shortcuts, the same kind of names for the same options, and so on.

Thanks,
Gabriel

http://microbians.com

http://cocoe.com

The UI have been greatly improved since CS3. I'm using AE, used to work on a dual screen setup, but now, more and more on 13" laptops and single huge screen destop setup. Pixel real estate is very high. I'd love to see the Photopsho ptreatment to AE, where you can reduce a panel ton a simple icon.

I'd also love to remove the panel header when I want. For exemple I always put the preview panel under the comp viewer so I just have the play/pause/preview button just under my viewer. But I loose a lot of real estate because of the "Preview" header. I'd love to keep the header when having tabs inside the panel, but not when I don't or when the panel can't have tabs.

There is also a bug when too much elements are diplayed in a panel. For exemple add 1000 layers in a comp in AE and twirl down for all of them the transformation properties. Now scroll down the panel and at some point it will become completly black.

Hope that helps,

Seb

What differences do you even notice?

Well, the various ways of collapsing panels into mini bars or icons obviously would be extremely useful for character/ text panels and others that you may use only once a day. Finally that would also allow customized slender UI palettes using Flash panels so all that UI noise that is thrown in the comp and layer viewers can exist separately and where the user really wants it...

Mylenium

After Effects: A configurable thumbnail view which can give you an overview of scenes/frames/comps. Primary use would be for viewing consistancy of graded shots and VFX shots.

Similar to this example of DV Rebels Tools - but with more intigration with AEs interface and less manual work assigning markers etc.

http://i56.tinypic.com/6rpkp2.jpg

I always wished Photoshop brushes somehow showed the feathering -- maybe radial lines? Next, ALL CS apps need the same shortcuts, icons and other interface signatures. Finally, Acrobat needs to get with the program and adopt some of the CS interface. It reminds me of a (shudder) Microsoft product -- an ugly, disorganized mess (no wonder hardly anyone knows how to use it).

Hi,

I am currently an assistant editor and have worked heavily in the Television commercial industry the past year. I work mostly as an AVID user however do have a respect for Premiere and what it could eventually be. Adobe seems to have made a huge leap in workflow between the adobe applcations and also the optimisation of playback speed and rendering. However, what I think it is lacking is a professional feeling cutting environment focused heavily on speed of navigating the interface and cutting tools, and also an assistant editor friendly application (ie Premiere currently has terrible subclipping features).

Overall I do like the of the interface/gui, however I believe that there are some wasted screen real-estate and some missing features which would make it a more pleasant experience to cut with.

Here is a few changes I have thought about;  (Most of these are interface/gui concerns but I may have got carried a little off topic in places.)

1. The controls for I/O cards (ie Blackmagic) are currently found in the sequence settings, this would be much easier if you could access it as a program wide setting so you can select and forget, As you can with FCP and even more so with AVID - the only reason you should ever have to even think about this is when you are doing a project that is not your norm.
2. The ability to create a sequence with default project settings without a settings panel appear. In both FCP and AVID you press the button to create a sequence, and it creates a sequence for you. Every time you have a dialogue box it slows an editor down.
3. A graphical keyboard layout editor - Editors are visual people - They know what there layout looks like in other applications.
4. The ability to assign a button only while holding key down, not just click on click off. ( ie. to be able to set  hold the option/alt key to enable snapping then let go and it is disabled)
5. More control over the layout of the project/bins panel.
   • Many editors are very particular about the size of there thumbnails (when in icon view) and also how many there are in each row and how they are sorted in this layout.
   • The ability to change timecode (and reel name) directly while in the list view without having to go into timecode settings window. Important for assistant editors.
   • The ability to disable the clip information and thumbnail. This would allow for more room in this window for people with lower resolution monitors, or when screen real-estate is important.
6. Customisation of the source/program monitors.
   • The ability for the user to remove any buttons taking up space that are not regularly used. (for example i would use the JKL buttons to play/stop the video. I have no need to have these buttons below the source/program monitors which I will never use) This will give more space for the sequence  or allow for larger playback views..
   • The quick way to change which timecode your viewing in the program monitor. (for example source timecode, v1 timecode, v2 timecode) etc
7. When you pull a sequence into the source monitor, it would be nice to have the ability to overwrite or insert the source clips instead of a nested sequence. Maybe this could be an option to change the default behavior depending on the user.
8. Sequence/Timeline;
   • Change 'Video 1' and 'Audio 1' to 'V1' and 'A1' - Most editors are smart enough to know what this means - and gives you more screen realestate.
   • Give us the option to choose if the audio and video have separate scroll bars or for them to be combined. Coming from avid you tend to find it more confusing.
   • The timeline workspace in and out points take up way to much space, this could be easier if you just used in and out point to determine work area.
9. The ability to 'render selected' and 'render in to out points'.
10. Media Management - The ability to choose between working from source clips like FCP and premiere do now, but also to transcode on import and save in a folder containing all media for project. (this goes for audio and stills as well as video) AVID based offline editors this are used to this workflow  and do not want to have to think about where souce clips are located. There needs to be an option to copy into a single media directory. Though Premiere does a great job working with a variety of formats many professional offline editors (and particularly their assistants) wish for everything to be a single file/codec type and to be all contained in a single place. 

How about a universal interface for timeline navigation? AE and PPro shortcuts for getting to the start/end of the timeline, forward/backwards one frame, etc. have little in common.

I work mostly with video editing and compositing - After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop. As many others I have a multi-monitor setup to maximize editing space. One of the nice things you could do is some way of auto populating all (or 2 out of 3) monitors with the application interface, if needed. It would be nice to see the workspace panels reflow without sticking with the monitor boundary splitting a panel or two in half.

Hope my clumsy write up makes sense.