AfterFX Media Browser Panel : Bug, useless or just bad design?

[Nuno Caroco]

Adobe Premiere Pro has an excellent import/ingest/media browser panel.
Opening and trying to use After Effects Media Browser panel is quite a different and bad experience.
No thumbnail previews for video ,whatever is MP4, MOV or R3D, not even a GIF.  No thumbnails for Jpeg, PNG.. anything. Premiere Pro even displays thumbnails of Illustrator AND psd files!
Not even refering, to no  "hover scrub" like Premiere (that exists since Creative Suite 6) - Just the icon display for the software associated in the system to open the file, and thats it.
EXR file existing on a folder, dont even show up, (like non-existent), according to the AE Media Browser Panel.

What are your thoughts about this?

[Mylenium]

Nobody uses the media panel in AE. If you do, then you're one in a million. Those limitations apply pretty much to everything. AE simply can't render thumbnials on the fly and do a lot of other things.

Mylenium

[Nuno Caroco]

I definitely dont use it Mylenium, but goes into my question, so its useless and poorly designed.
But thing is... it shouldn't be useless. Its essential to daily workflow, same way as is vital its existence in Premiere.
Its strikes me how in all these years something like this was neglected as a JDI. 

[Roland Kahlenberg]

AeViewer (works in AE and PPro) is a MediaBrowser that works as an Extension and does an amazing job. And it's free. https://aescripts.com/aeviewer/

[Nuno Caroco]

Thank you Roland. AE viewer is the tool i use since its release and can vividly recommend it to solve this issue to anyone, from my coworkers, to my teams, to my students.
What bothers me and my OCD brain 🙂 is how during all these years this was (and still is) neglected in AE, to the point that independent programmers need to create a tool, to solve something so deeply important in daily workflow and basic in After Effects features.

[Mylenium]

Well, one product manager's favorite child is the next PM's orphan and the Media Browser exactly fits that description. It's a typical example of a feature that seemed like a good idea at the time when everyone wanted to fuse AE and Premiere into a single über-app, but then things changed and it got abandoned in favor of other things. It happens all the time, but yeah, they probably simply should remove the code to not further confuse users...

Mylenium