I want my money back

Dear forum members,

I do appreciate your efforts to help me solve my problems with Premiere Elements 2019, but I am afraid this is a waste of your and my time. No, I didn’t download a pre-release version and I did download it with Chrome. Maybe my video is big, but that should not be a reason to crash my entire OS. A simple error message would suffice.

I worked half a century in IT, starting with writing a multi-tasking OS for the PDP8, continuing with a networked version of RT-11 on the PDP11 minicomputer, etc. Just saying – I am not new to computers. I am an avid user of Lightroom since the first beta version, with 20k of my own picture in my catalog. I did video editing with various programs from Adobe and others.

I tried PE with my Nvidia as well as my built-in Intel gpu. I tried to load the 30 clips in one go and in batches of no more than 10 clips. When I ask PE to render anything longer that a few minutes, it simple skips that, it hangs halfway or it crashes. It eats all system resources to the point that Windows Task Manager tells me it cannot show any details for lack of resources (but at least it knows how to tell me!).

The real problem is that some time ago, Adobe changed is priorities from creating great products to creating rich people. In the name of shareholder value, these folks work hard to increase to short-term stock price, using anything from subscription service to minimizing product development and support, thus forfeiting the future of the company and the value it provides to millions of people who are dependent on its products for their businesses and hobbies.

The irony is that a large part of the population is, through their savings and pension funds, shareholder and as such has been made to believe that tying the enumeration of their board members to the stock price would insure the long-term value of their investments. Instead, they got the greediest of the greedy to milk their business until an empty shell is all that is left.

The result is that if I try to contact Adobe, I am sent in a maze of web pages that always return me to the same spot without offering anything other than FAQ’s and a user forum. The result is software that is optimized for sales, with ever *new* features that should warrant upgrades and subscription, that works only for small demonstration projects but has never been tested on real work.

Am I unreasonable? I downloaded a copy of a low-level video editor, loaded my clips and can work on them without any issue. So how could that be too difficult for Adobe’s video editor?

I wish you all the best and good luck with trying to help Adobe customers. I am no longer one of them.

PS. The title of my post expresse my disappointment ; I do not really expect to get my 82 € back from these folks.