Adobe turning into an absolute joke

[cperry94]

I've got some things I'd like to get off my chest and I doubt Adobe will ever see this or consider what I'm about to say, but Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere have become incredibly difficult to work in and rely on as a professional in the video world. I know there's plenty of people who rant and rave about Adobe products but I'd happily jump ship if there was a legitimate alternative for After Effects. I'm in Premiere and After Effects at least 20-30 hours a week each. I do simple 2D motion design and video editing often a combined 60 hours a week. The amount of technical difficulties I run into on a daily basis is truly embarassing on Adobe's part. I totally get that software won't work 100% of the time. I work full time for a software company myself. I know how it goes. But I've been dealing with problems that have lasted years without being addressed by Adobe and in fact have in many cases been made worse with each update. Believe it or not I have 4 computers that I work off of, 2 belong to my full time job. The other two are my personal machines which I use to do freelance work. I have problems on every single machine. It's not machine specific. I've got both Mac and PC and have problems on both. Constant crashing, constant sluggish performance, constant bugs. These things though small end up being a huge deal and time suck when you're in the software all the time. It costs me a tremendous amount of time each week dealing with work arounds, fixes, or restarts. Sure these things are somewhat normal, but the thing that really set me over the edge was this most recent update. part of the After Effects update included a little star icon that pops up when you're using the shape tool. This might seem like no big deal because it really isn't, but that's exactly the point. Why the hell is the After Effects team adding in this stupid star icon when I've been dealing with horrible preview performance for YEARS in After Effects. Why would they spend even five minutes on something so dumb and pointless when there's a laundry list of consistent issues with the software that Adobe refuses to address. How is it that in the year 2020 I can have pretty much the most top of the line specs, Incredibly fast single core performance, crazy fast GPU, awesome RAM, which is what's needed for the best AE preview, and still have major preview issues even with just simple 2D character rigs. HOW HAS THIS NOT BEEN FIXED? I work in Cinema 4D and have zero problem previewing somewhat complex animations in 3D! And the constant crashing in Premeire and After Effects is absolutely ridiculous! Sure the new 3D workspace is a nice add, but I really don't care because they could have spent that time optimizing the performance and making it usable! Unfortunately After Effects doesn't really have competition when it comes to 2D motion graphics. It sucks feeling so stuck on software that doesn't really work well at all. Am I the only one experiencing this? I'll end by saying, I do think Adobe continues to be an invovative software company and what they've created as part of the creative suite is incredible. I'm grateful for those tools, but It just seems to me that in recent years they don't really care about making things work well, they just care about shiney new features that they can tout around at Adobe Max to impress everyone, while the actual creatives knee deep in the tools everyday suffer. I can't be the only one thinking this. 

[IkonikFilms]

Completely accurate - Adobe is so focused on "Coming out with the next new features" they totally ignore all quality of life fixes. Honestly would be THRILLED if they didnt "update" for a year just to really nail a release.

[Mylenium]

Yeah, sure. Currently AE is going from "already bad" to "terrible", but if you really want an honest opinion: It's not going to change. These days Adobe's primary business goal is just to sucker in people into their subscriptions. That's why this "annual cycle of death" even exists - they have to feed the machine. Otherwise simply move on. Notch and Cavalry are evolving fast and for tasks like color correction and such DaVinci always has been the better choice. no need to hang on to Adobe's broken software if you really need to get work done.

Mylenium

[MarekMularczyk]

You raised some interesting points and yes, there are many issues which haven't been fixed. From time to time we get performance issues even on the latest and fastest machines available. I've noticed lots of people having issues on all kinds of machines when I deliver training, on both mac and win, and often they happen randomly.

Let's hope they will fix them in "near" future 😉

[IkonikFilms]

Marek,

I understand that theres things to fix but its not "wink" cute worthy. This is my life - I rely on the performance of these programs as a WAY OF PUTTING FOOD ON THE TABLE. When they don't work it costs me money- when a program crashes it cost me peace of mind, when a program that I rely on to make money doesn't do its job it's not funny or cute. I am relied upon to deliver on time and "my program isn't working" isn't an acceptable excuse - I would throw away most of the new "features" Adobe added so that I could reliably do my job - for y'all it may be a few emails or an extra 100 hours of ho-hum typical QA and a manager slightly upset that its taking more time - but in my world where I'm expected to turn around huge projects FAST this attitude towards fast hardware is hilariously unhelpful. Especilly when the decline in performance happens with an extreme increase in hardware capabilities. Every second I lose to performance is literal money being burnt.  That response is like saying to a race car driver "sorry your engine is slow BUT hey we added cupholders and we MIGHT fix the engine soon haha! *wink*" - Adobe needs revisit your priorities.

[MarekMularczyk]

I understand and realise this is not what you would expect from the software. I feel for you and know that you are not the only one having problems with software 😉

[nubnubbud]

honestly... it doesn't seem like AE can keep up any more. it's just too old and probably filled with spaghetti code by the feel of it- it lags and hitches before it can use 50% of my computing power, and with the same hardware as 6 years ago, which I used to edit 6k anamorphic footage to add displacement, and pseudo-3d effects with a little lag, now 4k footage with a green screen and some images on top lags for minutes at a time and I'm writing this because I'm waiting for a track to finish (the program is too slow to register clicks while tracking). at least if got a bit faster when I turned hardware acceleration off.

I'm saying this from a realist standpoint. at some point after decades of work, a program just gets too bulky and clunky for optimizations to work without refactoring so much you might as well scrap it all. Just look at the blender team. cycles was slow- so they scrapped it and wrote a new one from scratch. it's now nearly ten times faster, with cleaner, more usable code.

I'll be honest, whenever a director asks me what to use, I steer them away from after effects now. this kind of service can't be so expensive it results in MAYBE breaking even for anyone who uses it- we can't all live on a few dollars a week, and it inflates my prices so much that I can't find work, and I'm here after a 16 hour unpaid work day because it takes hours just to do simple transforms and green screens once a project nears completion. This is costing my my time, my health, my money, my career, and both Adobe's and my reputation. what more do you want?

[whatyouare]

I concur. Their software is riddled with bugs nearly every release. Just another corporation who only cares about the dollar, rather than delivering an outstanding product.

[Ali Jaber]

The same suffering here, add to that another sort of problems if you have to deal with languages other than English. Bugs in Right to left text makes working with text really hard in AE, and those bugs are there for many years without any solution (bugs demonstrated in User Voice for several years now).

[s37734257t6zr]

I am so glad it's not just me, I am having to embrace premier pro, I am fluent in cyberlink powerdirector 365 and find pp just frustrating, annoying and slow. The interface is awful and I am sick of too many panels already. Nothing seems to work the same way twice! Most software seems to have a way of going shallow to complex, adobe just seem to throw you in the deep end and expect you to an expert diver!