New CC update (10/6/14) change the Blue color????

Report · Oct 06, 2014

I appreciate the hardwork involved in updating the apps, but the light blue on grey isn't cuttin' it for my eyes. Is there a way to change it? I can't seem to find a setting in Prefs > Appearances.

Report · Mar 31, 2015

I've found that I can't "edit" a post through the "inbox" page, but if I go to the thread on say the Contents page listing of threads, and open it there, I can edit. Which ... ahem ... I need to do from time to time.

It is rather an intriguing human-watching thing for me ... the way that some things work perfectly for many are yet abysmally for some. Another example, the Sg "improvement" back in December that caused it to determine that a LOT of mid to high-powered video cards didn't have sufficient video resources for Mercury-enabled work, so cut one back to software only ... but so crippled one could barely get one change to show for every minute you sat there, in other words ... VASTLY slower than if one would normally choose software only. I had this at first on my machine ... and after three weeks of Hades, it just stopped doing it one day. For most others, this continued. Yet ... the vast majority of Sg users never got this "illness". So what was special about those of us who caught that bug, compared to the vast majority who didn't?

And yes, I've now recalled hearing some folks from the Ae crowd complaining of exporting from AME ... yet for me, starting with this stuff in CS6 and using primarily PrPro & SpeedGrade, getting to export out of PrPro/AME is a HUGE relief, as I nearly always had issues exporting from CS6 Sg.

The whole issue of exporting from Ae is one that for someone like you, who specializes in that program, will drive you nuts. And yes, it would be nice if it worked better for you. My comments vis a vis mpeg2/mpeg4 noted that there is somewhat of a disconnect between the standard info and of course, the way it's utilized on my GH3. Which is most certainly not a 420x? VFR "device". Sorry if that wasn't clear.

I realize the "plan" for the whole CC model is to get the programs integrated with PrPro as the hub or center, and within that there is logical sense for putting the export from that program. However, for both the Ae crowd (like yourself) which had the export options reduced drastically ... and the Sg "native" mode crowd, who wanted a wider export capability, the result isn't ... optimal. I wish both Ae & Sg had vastly improved direct exporting ...

Neil

Report · Mar 31, 2015

Ok,scratch that (sort of) about the no editing of posts. I realize there is some kind of time-limit, but what that is I'm not sure. One of my posts I can edit, but not the one from a few minutes before. It's not on the hour either. Weird. Annnnywhooo ...

Sorry, R Neil, but what is a GH3? The only GH3 I can think of is a dslr camera from Panasonic. Actually it's a mirrorless, but anyway I don't think that's what you're referring to, eh?

-Tim

Report · Mar 31, 2015

Yep ... a rather handy tool, in fact, and vastly better at video than stills. I come from a career as a stills portraitist, 35+ years of making a living at it. The missus is our primary still shooter these days, I primarily do small interviews for clients, say parents remembering something in their life, shorts ... 10-20 minute items; highlights of portrait sessions; wedding highlights; all short-form. And the GH3 gets very nice 1080p footage that edits & grades rather well. It doesn't have say the widest dynamic range, and it's certainly not a log camera either. You need to know what it can and what it shouldn't be made to do ... and within that, it can match the footage of many vastly more expensive rigs. Doesn't come close to matching my D3 or the wife's D600 for stills, but then ... I never expected it to. Also it cost a lot less than either of those. And at my age is smaller & easier to pack around.

Of course ... sigh ... when you start adding sound gear, 7' monitors, a cage, and needing ff & a decent matte box as I'm shooting outside more these days ... then it's suddenly not so little anymore, is it?

Neil

Report · Mar 31, 2015

Ok, so we are talking about GH3 ... sorry, I was applying it in a different way to the conversation at hand. Gotcha' now! Yes, I have been looking at that and the Lumix for video. Funny, I'm doing the opposite. Been mostly a video guy for decades (with a little photography sprinkled in), and now starting to look at branching out into pro-photography. I love them both for different reasons, of course, but also enjoy the overlap. Especially now with the physical overlap of the devices. Still trying to get a D70 and/or a D5 Mark III. Both would help with pro photo and add a nice cam to my video arsenal. I missed the whole DSLR-video boat, but want to jump in.

Absolutely true about all the accesories though! LOL !

Report · Mar 31, 2015

Neil, most of what you said is moot (I think) because I am talking about H264 AND you admitted you weren't exporting from AE. But to address a few points ...

"that mpeg4 has a vastly heavier compression than mp2" -- Pretty sure you mean MPEG2, and yes it does, but so what? It's more efficient, that's all ... just means you get the same quality for a smaller size. Heavier compression does not equal lower quality necessarily. Depends on what you mean. Yes, an H264/Mp4 at 2MB/s is going to look worse (maybe, depends on the resolution of the video actually) than a 15Mb/s encode.

"But there are many other codecs available for export ..." -- NO there aren't ... not ANYMORE, not in AE. That is the point. H.264 has been and still is THE optimal codec for both client previews ... and often final renders. Or even WMV had really nice use of compression v. quality. Thank goodness AVI was not removed, and while I love my Canopus codecs, most other people don't have them and they render large files like any final format.

Report · Mar 31, 2015

The problem Neil is that there are things which before even you develop a program are pure common sense. I'm developing my movie on Pompeii and Herculaneum . At the end of the day after having for hours tried to make the best of Photoshop to make the textures for my 3D monuments, my eyes simply hurt. Of course one could change in Windows the size of characters, but by doing so you have problems when a page or a command appears truncated! And each time you want to reset the original or new size you have to close your programs and close the session etc...I always have the feeling that programs are made for people under 40 with no problem whatsoever with their vision. I'm lucky to have a good one at 73. But even so it is sometime a real nightmare.

In a non Adobe pluggin, which you can use with AE they forgot to have a command to save from time to time the scene. It is Element 3D from Videcopilot which is a superb one. The other day I was making the 240 columns of Pompeii's Forum! For some reason my program crashed and I had realized that I didn't went back into AE for a long time! As a result I lost all my work although I was near completion of the damn job! In AE I have an automatic saving every 5 minutes, it is not working when you're in the pluggin.

Again these things are mandatory in the development of a program of such complexity and should be implemented at the beginning of its making not years later when the implementation becomes a nightmare for the programmer to set them without the risk of creating bugs everywhere. It's again pure common sense and logic.

Report · Mar 31, 2015

Any company that opens up their software to third-party vendors *will* have problems with being blamed for problems from the use of those plug-ins. There have been several times when users of say PrPro from a CS5 vintage wanted to bring a plug-in forward to CC and use it exactly like they had five years ago in what, three generations of the main program back? And were mad at Adobe for being told that the issue was they needed to go buy the newer version of that plug-in that *could* work with Adobe's CC programs. Or the plug-ins that come out with a new version ... that itself has bugs, for which Adobe gets blamed when the original vendor doesn't respond whatever to their customers ... at all. That's happened rather recently. A number of folks on here were wanting heads at Adobe for that ... and then finally, the other company released an update ... and magically all those nasty Adobe-cause problems went away.

I'll also note, I don't recall any of the irate folks posting back here with any apology for their previous rants. Even the "major" plug-in Boris had some problems not far back, which ... when Boris fixed their code, suddenly disappeared from the boards here.

I don't know if that plugin you used either somehow causes auto-save to not function or what ... but Adobe can't be held responsible for someone else's work. At the same time ... oh my OUCH! That would have been an outrageous few hours after that crash for you. You may have noted that shooternz is NOT a proponent of auto-save, he manual saves incrementals every few minutes. He insists that we all should give up the reliance on auto and "just do it!" ourselves. Habitually.

I am over time seeing his wisdom more and more. Not that I've turned off auto-save, mind you ... but I do incremental my saves rather often.

And now ... I've got a drive the computer says needs formatting ... which was formatted, I was going to use it to backup-to next ... but hadn't. Ok, no problem ... but ah, someone has told me they put a fair amount of the personal/family pics of the last 6 months or so on that drive on my computer (over the network) on account of it was completely empty. I didn't know they were there ... so of course, I hadn't backed them up like I always do any imaging material. I'm rather ... non-plussed, shall we say?

Neil

Report · Mar 31, 2015

Neil, you completely misunderstood me. I'm not saying there's a bug here. I'm just giving an example of another example from a company ie Videocopilot who did not think a minute that an autosave option should be added in the preferences of their program when used with Adobe AE because in that particular situation their program has no access obviously to the Adobe autosave option.

The example is to again enhance the fact that there are options which are mandatory in a program at the installation state especially for people like you and other professionals who have heavy projects and can't see them going in smoke because for some unforeseen reason or because plunged into their development they forgot to use such a command. We are not machines, we are human beings and at times we must be helped by the machine we"re using when this kind of option can be installed by the developer.

The actual discussion concerning the colors and characters used is of the same kind. Adobe or any developer is not here to tell us which color or set of characters we should like, it's none of their business, we must be able to choose that by ourselves in the preferences tab.

The same goes for instance for Nvidia which when you decide to have an automatic update of their graphic cards, create in your computer an account which is not manageable from the windows manager account in the configuration panel! I discovered that ; the account is Updatususer and what do I know of the securities used from Nvidia on the account behind my back! It 's the user and the user alone who is allowed whatever account he chooses on his computer. There's a huge discussion on the matter on the Microsoft site of people furious among them someone from the US government! Those are examples of things where the matter should be in the hands of the user. As for me I decided not to buy anymore cards from Nvidia. I understand the reaction of Timmy here. It's of the same point of view.

Someone earlier pretended that using yellow characters was not a good choice for the physical way the eye focuses on colors, I'm sorry but is he an ophthalmologist to have proofs of that? Let the medical staffs make recommendations and let's not play doctors!

Report · Mar 31, 2015

"Someone earlier pretended that using yellow characters was not a good choice for the physical way the eye focuses on colors, I'm sorry but is he an ophthalmologist to have proofs of that? Let the medical staffs make recommendations and let's not play doctors!"

Can't tell if you are trolling or are serious, Claude. If you're serious, you need to educate yourself in a major way. You don't have to "play doctors" to know that this is a serious issue for some people. Hell, I don't have that condition and I find that when I switch to CC 2014 I get a severe headache, sometimes a true migraine after about an hour or so of use.

That coupled with the aforementioned removal of much needed H264 output, and I only use 2014 when I ABSOLUTELY have to ... which fortunately isn't very often.

Report · Mar 31, 2015

Why do my posts say "(!) Currently being moderated." ? Just curious.

Report · Mar 31, 2015

Timmy I'm not trolling at all and I read it here. Please do not be rude or agressive. And as for my comment about the focusing problem here it is:

"86. Re: Premiere Pro CC: can blue text interface be changed back to yellow?

APK SOFT Grafik3 14 oct. 2014 16:26 (en réponse à ninose11)

Wtf Adobe, blue text on dark background? Who did this? Does he know a bit about colors? Human eyes are least sensitive to blue, and blue on dark background has also a bad contrast. Also the focusing distance to a blue color is different than to red(yellow). This all makes it hard to read. When something works don't change it, now, fix it pls back or make it user adjustable.

It was in a discussion on the same problem about PrP and unless I'm mistaken you were part of it. I'm perhaps not a professional and 73 but I've a very good memory and still not gaga! And there was also in that discussion and I can't find someone who was talking on the point where the human focuses in the different colors which made it blur if the yellow characters were used.

Moreover myself have problem reading the Photoshop and Speedgrade (that's why I've renounced to use SG by the way) because of the colors and the size of characters used and I do have a very good eyesight checked yesterday to be precise by my doctor as a matter of fact. And as education wise Timmy I've got a PHD in FInance and was a Vice President of one of France's major merchantbank with branches in NYC and LA;.

Report · Mar 31, 2015

I'd like to add to my comments that in the same discussion about Prp and the use of Blue instead of yellow a member of the staff said very precisely that the suggestion was a good one but that of course it would be tricky to implement it because of the actual complexity of the architecture of the software.

This goes exactly in line with what I was saying in my comments earlier. When you add devices or options like this too late of course you create a whole new situation which can be tricky to implement and make sure it doesn't create malfunctions of the software.
The same goes with updates and I think that Neil here said to someone that it was better when you were in a the middle of an editing not to upgrade your software because of risks of incompatibility. This makes sense and I do follow his advice.

Report · Apr 01, 2015

Kevin Monahan was the Adobe staffer here who put out the advice to NOT upgrade during major projects ... or perhaps even minor ones. He's a long-time pro editor hisself, dating back to FCP more than a decade ago, as a user, certified trainer, and teacher of pro workflow to pro users. Before coming into PrPro & the Adobe Way, of course. But as he notes, that's what he taught long before he even came to Adobe.

It's problematic in action as sometimes the programs can't play nicely in different versions fully installed on the same computer. So you've got a project in CC-dash-2 that's ongoing, and want to start a new project in the latest CC2014.2 ... um ... got different computers? Wanna clone your system drive, then on the other one uninstall one & install the newer CC? Or, simply uninstall the old one, install the new ... work that project ... then uninstall to re-install the old, work that project ... huh.

That's something that could use a bit of tweaking on Adobe's coding side.

Neil

Report · Apr 01, 2015

R Neil Haugen wrote:

It's problematic in action as sometimes the programs can't play nicely in different versions fully installed on the same computer. So you've got a project in CC-dash-2 that's ongoing, and want to start a new project in the latest CC2014.2 ... um ... got different computers?

I've never had a problem with this. I have CS5, CS6, CC, and CC 2014 all installed on the same computer without problem.

I don't recall hearing anyone else with issues doing this either. AE should be able to have multiple versions installed at the same time without a problem.

Report · Apr 01, 2015

Supposedly, completely different "major" versions should work as they are for you. However, it's been noted on the forum here (and acknowledged by staffers) that what *should* happen and what *does* happen on many computers are not perfectly congruent. For some users apparently, having twain CC versions is from somewhat problematic to a crash-fest.

Particularly there's been a problem in the CC2014.1 and CC 2014.2 releases. These were actually perhaps closer to a "major" change than a "dot" revision. There were projects in 2014.1 that could not go "back" to the CC "base" versions, yet were completely broken by the supposed minor 'update' of 2014.2.

So the pros with a project that really had to stay CC2014.1 yet who'd started projects in or had others in their shops working 2014.2 ... hit a wall. You just can't have both 2014.1 and 2014.2 on the same machine. You can't pass projects forth & back between them either ... and not everyone reacts well to the suggestion they have multiple many-thousand buck editing stations per editor. It's less of an issue say for a single-person "shop" like myself, than for those working in an editing or grading "house" with multiple people.

Neil

Report · Apr 01, 2015

Ok, let's give back to "Ceasar" what we owe to him as the say goes. I just wanted to stress out what I'd said before and the way the discussion deviated unfortunately.

Going back to the main subject of the discussion, and suggesting an idea for later major upgrade as this would probably solve the case, in DAZ3D there is a possibility of completely personalize the workspace and in particular its different colors that might be a way to let the user be fully in charge of what is best for his comfort of work.

As in AE and PrP you can change the positions of the different panels but you have also full control of all the colors of the different elements, way the commands are highlighted or not, etc...Perhaps they are going too far in those options but this could be a source of inspiration here. Their sole mistake is not to have given the option to change the characters size which are much too small and practically unreadable.

Report · Apr 02, 2015

I'm rather eager to see what Adobe will do to fix the color issue. It's recognized as a problem, but naturally there will be no public info until they roll out the drum-beat blog announcing the next release ... and so in the meantime we have no clue. So ... we're all essentially sitting in the waiting room together. Isn't life grand?

Neil

Report · Apr 02, 2015

Do you serve drinks and "amuse gueules"? Have a nice day.

Report · Apr 02, 2015

Darn ... I was hoping you'd serve the food!

Neil

Report · Apr 11, 2015

Looks like we STILL will not be able to change the color. WTH? I don't get it Adobe. Our breathern in the Premiere forums aren't taking it well. I completely agree with KMS's statement in regards to Adobe's response that we should keep requesting the feature:

"I don't understand why we would submit a feature request again either. I think people were very clear on what they wanted... Why pull up short like this? Obviously Adobe wants to stick with the blue for some reason." -KMS

I also don't understand why it is so hard to implement ... seems like the height of programming inefficiency, no?

Report · Apr 11, 2015

I've just watched a tutorial on the new AE version 13.5 ( https://youtu.be/MfOH7UyH0lQ ) which is to bepresented at NAB and obviously the Blue is not color corrected! Again the dogs bark and the caravan goes by ; really sad and disappointing....

Report · Jun 16, 2015

I submitted another feature request for adobe to ignore. I can't believe they updated the appearance panel so extensively without actually modifying the selected keyframes. Not that the modification helps the things it does change. Bring Back the Yellow. You people who make design software are bad at designing UIs. Stop trying to be clever, and just go back to what works.

Report · Jun 17, 2015

Hello AF,

I submitted another feature request for adobe to ignore.

I know you're just kidding, as feature requests are never ignored. They are counted as to provide priorities for the engineering team.

I'm also sorry that the Appearance preference didn't contain the features that you wanted for this release. At least there was incremental improvements made at a time when the engineering team was focusing mostly on performance enhancements. I will continue advocating for more customizability.

Thanks,

Kevin

Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community & Engagement Strategist – Pro Video and Audio

Report · Jun 17, 2015

The adjustments for the UI were the first thing that I tried in the latest version (2015). The verdict... If Adobe was going for less terrible, congratulations Adobe nailed it. You can change the brightness all that you want. The blue is just bad. Adobe could have put this to rest had they put a color picker in there. Why not just do it right the first time? I have a hard time believing that the color controls are so buried in the code that it can't be done. Just for reference, look at the control that Cinema 4D provides. It has been there for years. I think the blue is purely marketing because there isn't a single logical reason for the change. What are they so reluctant to give users more control? Off to fill out a feature request. If I can't pick any color, give me a check box for "legacy color scheme".

Report · Jun 17, 2015

I replaced the png files with yellow in the framework of the After Effects application, itself, so make the selected keyframes any dang color you want by default. I'll take 45 seconds out of my day that the engineers couldn't to fix it for future updates when you decide to make it all a unified slab of 50% grey.