Turn Off Scroll Wheel Zooming

This takes care of it

MagicPrefs

     Pictures created and edited with Adobe Photoshop

Even though I can use the magic mouse without too many unintentional zooms (still happens pretty often) I still would very much prefer it did not zoom into center of the screen with the scroll wheel. I can see why we can't have the Alt+Space shortcut because space starts/stops preview, but maybe the simplest and best solution would be to have it zoom whenever you hold Alt and scroll (as it currently does, towards your cursor) and add a hotkey for centering the comp window if you want the zoom centered for some reason.

Then scroll on the mouse can be returned to actually scrolling, which might make it less necessary to zoom with comp window centered.

With all due respect to the dismissive "buy another mouse" contingent, that's a ridiculous "fix", and this is indeed just the result of slightly weak planning/coding on Adobe's part.  Not debatable.

It's not the Mouse's fault.  AE was written specifically for this hardware condition.  Magic Mouse is not new.  No carpet was pulled out from under Adobe here by surprise.  The mouse ships with the very Apple machine AE was written to run on.  Therefore Magic Mouse will most certainly be used with AE more often than other mice.

The scroll-wheel has been consciously hardcoded to zoom in AE (evidently a poor decision) - whereas this functionality is not so of most other apps.  This was a subjective call, didn't have to be that way. 

In practice the behavior of the scroll/zoom on Magic Mouse in AE is, absolutely, twitchy and unpredictable.  That cannot be debated. 

People who claim to have just "learned" not to cause unintended inputs through sheer will of force are being somewhat disingenuous.  C'mon.  It's too easy to trigger.  You know it.  Happens all the time.  Mean to or not.  Whoops - zoomed in... zoomed out.  I'd hate to add up how much time each day I spend correcting AE's unintended zooms.

And yet users of Magic Mouse will report that such unpredictability and awkwardness simply does not happen so persistently on other apps.

Others have suggested a key command to activate it - like some other Adobe apps (duh) - and yes, I agree that would be smart.

Been a user of AE since the early 90s.  And annoyed as hell that this is still so buggy. 

One of the more brilliant things the Indesign team did back in the day was add a preset in the keyboard shortcuts options for "Quark" shortcuts. For designers switching from Quark this was a huge incentive, not having to learn where everything is since Quark and Indesign shared a lot of features and commands, albeit with different shortcuts.

I have years of experience using Illustrator, Indesign, Photoshop, etc and all these programs have the same zooming and panning methods; hold Alt+scroll wheel or do Cmd+Space, Cmd+Alt+Space. Works beautifully. Photoshop changed it up where you don't drag a zoom box anymore...and it still works beautifully because it still zooms where you want when you want.

Now I'm in After Effects and zooming in with the scroll wheel makes no sense to me. If it zoomed towards the cursor like the Alt+Cmd commands in the other programs I could use it, but it just dumbly zooms into the center of the screen and I have to hold space and pan over to wherever I wanted to zoom into anyway. So it's actually to just press Z and use the zoom tool. Totally unacceptable.

I'm sure there's experienced After Effects users with specialized hardware that might like the feature but, at least for the sake of uniformity with the other Adobe Software, it would be great if it zoomed like the other programs at least as an option similar to the "Quark Shortcuts" that let Indesign steal users away from the dinosaur.

Related: I also really miss the Cmd + 0 and Cmd + 1 shortcuts for fitting the zoom to the screen or putting it at 100% (especially when I try to scroll and end up at some weird zoom level instead). Not sure why they hide/show menu items by default in After Effects when every other program in the world uses them for zoom levels.

Could sure use help in these areas to make the program less intimidating for newer users. I find myself using the free iMovie software that came with the Mac for anything simple, goes much faster when you don't have to learn a whole new set of shortcuts and commands from all the other software.

I hate to drag on with the complaining and make a nit-picky issue into a civil rights issue, but... I gotta say, this issue is over 4 years old and people are STILL searching around for an answer.   Adobe, can you please chuck a little checkbox in there when After Effects gets its next facelift, to put a modifier on the scroll-zoom funtion?    Cheers!  James

You can't turn it off, but with a little practice you can avoid the problems. I've used a Magic Mouse with AE since they came out. At first I had a little trouble with the same problem you are having, but after about a week the problem magically went away because I practiced. I can't remember when the last time was that I accidentally changed the view in an AE comp window by accidentally scrolling with my Magic Mouse. I do use it to change the view when I want to though.

I also have to beg to differ on the keyboard. I love my Apple keyboards and I can work on them much longer without hand pain than I can on the Logitech or Microsoft keyboards on my PC. The Mac keyboards have had two or three times the use, at least twice the abuse, and they are (one after 6 years) still working perfectly. Mice, keyboards, and cars are a matter of personal taste. Also, every time I have broken, damaged or otherwise screwed up my Magic Mouse, Apple has replaced it for free by just making a Genius Bar appointment.

I actually created an account, logged in, and decided to respond as the information (as recently as 2012) that is being provided is incorrect on so many levels. It's quite easy to disable the scroll wheel, even on a magic mouse. For Mac OS X users take the following actions:

Open Settings > Click on "Universal Access" > Select the "Mouse & Trackpad" tab > Click the "Mouse Options..." button > Deselect "Scrolling".

The scroll wheel on your mouse, regardless of type, will be disabled until you so choose to re enable it.

The "correct" way to handle this would be either to treat zoom and scroll as two separate things (like indesign, photoshop, and illustrator do, by the way) and require a keyboard/mouse combo for the scroll wheel to become a zoom wheel, or to put a little "lock view" icon somewhere in the composition preview window.

I just got a new Mac, and it came with a magic mouse, which I have never used before. I've always avoided Apple's mice because I didn't like them, but I DO like this one. I hadn't used AE for the first 2-3 weeks of using this machine, and just started a new motion graphics project this morning.

Now the Magic Mouse that I have been using on AI, PS, ID, FL, AU and DW without any issues whatsoever is completely useless in AE thanks to this "feature."

Why not have a little toggle lock button built into the panel's bottom menu stuff. Even a menu checkbox to turn off scroll wheel zooming would be fine.

Or at least let us set some reasonable zoom bounds (25-200% would be workable) so that you don't find yourself staring at a single pixel "preview" without warning...

"Buy a new mouse" is an absurd response. Fixing this issue would be trivial. It is a bad UI practice to use a scroll wheel as a zoom wheel without a helper key. What other apps do this, other than FPS games with sniper rifles? Maybe Adobe is being tapped to develop the next Call of Duty and they wanted to get some practice?

This won't stop the scrolling, but the keyboard shortcut "Shift+/" will make the preview window zoom to fit. It's an easy command as those two buttons are right next to each other on the keyboard. It doesn't fix the problem, but it seems like the best way to quickly and easily return the preview window to normal. Also, just pressing "/" will zoom to 100%. I'm using CS4, but I assume it's the same on other releases.