Have new features according to user needs, not what your marketing team thinks

[Sterphy]

After Effects has become an apalling mess and Adobe is a joke of a company.  Why on earth are the new features etc., being driven by your marketing department instead of what users want and need?  We're in a ridiculous position where updating After Effects with the hope of fixing one lot of bugs just introduces a whole load more.  Can someone with a bit of backbone at Adobe suggest to their bosses that they are f***ing the company?  The ONLY reason I still have CC is because they offered me money off when I went to cancel, but I'm slowly shifting my workflow away from Adobe completely because they cannot make a decent piece of software. 

Adobe, please DO YOUR JOB so that I can do mine!  

[Mylenium]

Sadly it's all too true, but it won't change. Most Adobe programs have turned into veritable dumpster fires of broken and incomplete features.

Mylenium

[jenkmeister]

Ok, we are listening. What features do YOU want in AE?

[Sterphy]

Well there's about 10 years of basic requests that people have been asking for that you could look through. Top of my list would be timeline folders. 

[Warren Heaton]

While my personal feature wish list for Adobe After Effects is getting a bit long, and the ones I've posted haven't received many votes, I'd like to balance this thread with some appreciation for the software:

• Multi-frame rendering gave my 2017 workstation new life, extending its usefulness for at least a few more years.
• Composition Profiler makes it super easy to spot layers that are slowing down the render.
• Cache Frames While Idle allows comps that used to take several minutes to render to render in seconds.
• Safe Mode makes it much easier to isolate a plug-in causing a crash (no more renaming plugins in the Finder/Explorer with parentheses, "~", or "¬").
• Roto Brush 3 is coming along very nicely.
• Content-Aware Video Fill is excellent, avoiding the need to use Mocha Pro's Remove Module (which is great but expensive), and upcoming AI improvements should make it even better.
• Looping a preview in a downstream comp while making edits in an upstream comp was something I thought was too much to hope for. The extensive changes under the hood that made this possible are deeply appreciated. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
• This one goes back to Cosa After Effects: being able to reduce the comp resolution and use low-resolution source footage proxies and comp proxies has been very helpful when starting a project on a lower-end workstation and finishing it on a higher-end one.

[Chriso M8]

would love for this to be acknowledged
https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-ideas/select-corner-for-rounded-rectangle-shape-anchor-...

[Warren Heaton]

@Chriso M8 

There's a prior feature request for this that could use more votes.  Personally, I'd love to see the same behavior as Illustrator for rounded corners.  That is, being able to change the corner radius in After Effects in the same way we can change the corner radius of live shapes in Illustrator.

[InfiniteWhale]

Have the AE team ever actually implemented any of the requests made in this forum?

[InfiniteWhale]

content aware video fill is trash

[hellopaul4]

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@Sterphy wrote:

After Effects has become an apalling mess and Adobe is a joke of a company.  Why on earth are the new features etc., being driven by your marketing department instead of what users want and need?  We're in a ridiculous position where updating After Effects with the hope of fixing one lot of bugs just introduces a whole load more.  Can someone with a bit of backbone at Adobe suggest to their bosses that they are f***ing the company?  The ONLY reason I still have CC is because they offered me money off when I went to cancel, but I'm slowly shifting my workflow away from Adobe completely because they cannot make a decent piece of software. 

Adobe, please DO YOUR JOB so that I can do mine!  

---

@InfiniteWhale Not sure about this forum, but I've previously requested things and they've come to fruition. The developers used to get actively involved in chats - but this is going back about a decade. My first ever feature request was to have Auto-save ON by default; in the olden days, if you installed a new version of AE, the auto-save pref would default back to "off"...which obviously you'd only discover after a crash had destroyed hours of work! So you've got me to thank if you've ever reverted to an auto-saved version (kind of.....😂).

[Sterphy]

It's wild!  They act as if we're not paying a subscription for this software.  

[jenkmeister]

No one is acting like that. I am sorry if we haven't picked your feature request. We get 100s a month. We are continuing to prioritize and deliver as we can. Your request for timeline folders is high on the priority list. 

[JohnColombo]

@InfiniteWhale If you filter the posts in the Ideas forum by the Status "Released", you will see requests that have been implemented and released.

[Sterphy]

Well a decade ago Adobe were still putting out (relatively) well made software. Things have changed. 

[Sterphy]

Wow, there's like 5 things in there! 

[motionben]

@jenkmeisterthank you for the improvements that have occurred in AE since you joined the team.

I'd like improved UI performance on Windows.

I'm on Windows 10/AMD CPU/NVIDIA platform, dual-displays, and my timeline responsiveness gets very slow if I have a bunch of keyframes visible/selected or the graph editor open. Typically this involves shape layers, even with outlines hidden. Makes me wonder if the UI can't keep up (and I remember a comment years ago about UI speed improvements coming!). If I shrink my timeline so fewer layers are visible, or I select fewer keyframed properties, voila, speeds go up a bit. If I shrink to a single display the UI gets quicker again.

Thanks!

[jenkmeister]

@motionben Have you tried the AE Beta builds of late? There is a significant perf update around the Timeline and keyframe UI performance that we have out in testing. 

[jduree]

Bring back PRO Import on Mac. Working with Aivd editors is an entire workflow to "clean" the AFF through DaVinci then bring it into Premier because it can't understand Avid timlines and nested clips right, and THEN into After Effects. And stop making a new full-length comp for Premier Text elements pasted into aftereffects. either paste them as the raw layer or trim them down so we can see the right durations.

Second

The full type panel from Illustrator so we can use swashes and variable type as native text with scripting access to ALL properties for templating

[InfiniteWhale]

Can you just take a bit longer to release a stable, properly working version? This since the annual update cycle started it's just gotten slower and buggier every year.  I feel like I'm in this state of waiting for an update to fix bugs only to see what else has been broken. And working with editors outside of my company who are on different versions - nightmare! 

[motionben]

@jenkmeisterthanks for pointing me to the beta! Updated to the latest build yesterday and opened a shape-heavy comp, definitely noticed an improvement in timeline UI performance. Still can create some noticeable lag if I select a lot of keys and try to move them simulataneously on the timeline but overall UI perf feels snappier. Looking forward to getting this improvement in production builds. Thanks!

[Johannes282932510fis]

@jenkmeister On the home window:

• Recent Projects, such is the case with other Adobe apps. 
• Tutorials related to the most expert use of After Effects from real commercial productions. Not only absolute beginner tutorials. Entice me to continue paying for Adobe for every single use case, such as compositing, colour and 3D. The forums are a great place to learn from others, but that is a poor excuse for not producing the best, most useful tutorials in the world relating to what people want to learn and promoting it in your most robust app. Adobe should be at the forefront of getting more people to understand how it competes, inside the app.

[InfiniteWhale]

AE is never *really* out of beta though...