I need to turn off the scroll wheel zooming in After Effects. If I am looking at a Comp window and I scroll with my mouse, the view zooms in or out. I don't want to do this, especially because I have a Magic Mouse and any stray movement suddenly zooms my window. It's a realy problem. Can I turn this "feature" off?
In the graphics programs I use -- AI, PS, IND -- the zoom problem doesn't occur when you simply swipe. Swipe-to-scroll is handy, and I wouldn't want to disable it system-wide or in any single application. The zoom problem occurs when you option-swipe. This is a problem because my left hand is constantly, almost involuntarily, working the shift-option-command keys, and at random times I happen to be pressing option while moving my fingers ever so subtly on the mouse, causing my screen to zoom out to birds-eye view; very irritating! MagicPrefs should have simply added a "disable option-swiping" checkbox to their otherwise brilliant bit of freeware.
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.
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?
just bought the new After Effects, etc - and my magic mouse keeps zooming in on scroll even after I disable all of it's possible checkboxes in the system preferences. it's soooo frustrating. and having to buy a new mouse without that functionality seems rather annoying. I vote for AE preferences to simply disable that feature when I don't want it.
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.
You probably should have actually read the thread content instead of creating an account. Nobody has any trouble at all understanding how to disable the scroll wheel on a system-wide basis. Nobody.
That isn't the problem, and never was. The problem is that AE handles the scroll wheel function incorrectly, and in a way that is particularly incompatible with the magic mouse, and there is no way to turn off that "feature" of AE.
People want to use the scrolling function of their magic mouse on just about every application EXCEPT AE. I, for one, constantly use the scrolling functions. If I use a mouse that doesn't have a scroll function, I feel like I am missing a limb.
The solution for me to this problem is that I have a second, wired mouse stuck off to the side of my machine, and whenever I need to use AE, I grab that mouse, then go back to using the one I want to use for every other application in the world.
That's how bad it is.
Telling people to turn off scrolling system-wide is not helpful. Being a condescending jerk while doing so just makes you look incompetent.
PECourtejoie, If that was the first response instead of Mylenium's utterly unhelpful and insulting "buy a new mouse for $20" then you could have saved us a lot of trouble. In fact what does this "MVP+++" badge even mean? Mostly Valueless Post? seen as you're the first badged person in this thread to offer something that isn't just an insult or nonsensical rambling.
I have already made this feature request on several occasions, replied to this thread almost 3 years ago and yes this still bothers me on a daily basis.
The joys of a lazy company running the monopoly on creative software.
In fact what does this "MVP+++" badge even mean? Mostly Valueless Post?
The badge is given by the forum system based on the number of posts a user has made that have been marked helpful or correct by other forum users. Note that Mylenium has over 27,000 posts on the Adobe forums, many of which (especially dealing with very technical things with After Effects) are extremely useful. I know of nobody better at troubleshooting program issues. And, in this case, his post is a workaround we have to use until Adobe gives the option to disable scroll wheel zooming. It is not unhelpful or insulting; it is the only solution (besides sending in a feature request, which everyone with this issue should do). The AE team is very small and therefore has to prioritize fixes based on number of users effected and the severity of the fix.
wolfpuncher wrote:
The joys of a lazy company running the monopoly on creative software.
Should Adobe put more resources to the After Effects team so that they can deal with issues like this? I think so. It's atrocious that the Photoshop team is so large compared to the After Effects team, considering that After Effects does most of the same stuff as Photoshop with the added complexity of video standards, codecs, animation, etc. I'm amazed that AE works as well as it does considering the small team that's working on it.
While you may consider Adobe lazy, please don't think of the AE team as such. Whenever I've dealt with them, I've found them to be very passionate about their work and dedicated to making a quality product as best they can.
Nobody "likes that behavior." It's the functional equivalent of having the steering wheel of your car control the windshield wipers when you don't have your foot on the gas pedal. There is never a time when it is more desirable than the alternative.
I've already submitted a feature request. I've submitteded probably dozens of them for various Adobe products through the years. Well, many of my requests were filed as "bug fixes" and not "feature requests" because let's be honest...most of these are UI bugs, not "features."
I have had literally one of my bugs get fixed (in InDesign) over the years. I started submitting bugs back in CS3 days. One of my favorite (show-stopping, force-quit-inducing) bugs in InDesign still remains, is completely reproducible on any Mac with InDesign from CS2 through CS6. You can force the entire system to hang just by trying to change the color of text in a table with the swatches panel open. Since CS2. If it is a big enough table, InDesign WILL lock up and then implode. If the Bug/Feature reporting tool worked then that bug wouldn't exist anymore. Based on prior evidence, there is almost zero chance that Adobe will fix this scroll to zoom problem. They can't even be bothered to fix actual show-stopping bugs nearly a decade and 5 major releases after they were first reported.
I would beg to differ. Who hard-coded their app to use a non-standard mouse wheel scroll (in violation of their own standards)? The Apple touch mouse does suck though; with all their design brilliance Apple has yet to make a good mouse or keyboard.
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 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
Basically the first thing I did 4 years ago when I first encountered this problem and a few more times every time this thread comes up. Shall I submit one every day until it's fixed?
Maybe now that I'm paying on a subscription for this software there should be a way to commit my monthly payment to a specific cause…
Maybe now that I'm paying on a subscription for this software there should be a way to commit my monthly payment to a specific cause…
I hope that was a joke. Setting up an adversarial relationship with a vendor is no way to get what you need from them.
After about an hour with the problem my muscle memory became retrained and I have not noticed it since. In fact I use the feature all the time to check my comp. A bug for you is a feature for me.
Partially joking, struggling to see the benefit to me of this subscription relationship for the rest of my career if they're not going to fix issues that would take an afternoon at best to implement.
Guessing you don't use a touch mouse, so no idea why you're in this thread.
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.
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.
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.
These controls are gone in Yosemite - I've tried using settings under System Prefs / Accessibility under both Zoom and Mouse & Trackpad / Mouse options. I can't find how to disable the scroll gesture in inDesign. I don't love the Magic Mouse - but do I really have to buy another? Is the trackpad a good workaround?
94
Replies
AdChoices