I love those boxes that sometimes pop up while Premiere Elements is loading because I'm always full of ideas for improvements. I've now got way too many to squeeze into the little text box. Here they are:
When I'm adding a transition between clips, if I click on the duration up arrow, the duration goes from 1 second to 2, but then jumps to 4. This is very annoying. If I want a 3-second duration, I have to either the down arrow to go back to 3, or click very slowly to make sure I get the number I want. If I want 4, I'll select it. I wonder if this feature was meant to save time for people wanting to get to higher numbers, but really, it just makes selecting 3 seconds more time consuming. I'm not a fast clicker, but even I can get to 4 on my own with needing to skip 3.
Make the beat marker detector work. I have never been able to get it to work despite almost all my videos being music videos. I have tried and tried. It surprises me that you guys can't get it right because 10 years ago, music app visualisations were spot-on.
When I'm undoing or redoing, tell me or show me what the changes are. If I'm undoing or redoing changes in a Word document, it moves to the location where each change was made, and shows me the change, and leaves the cursor at that point. That's what I want APE to do. I see there is sometimes a text file with a .log extension which has text which seems to describe changes. At the very least, I'd like to see this kind of description when I hover over the undo or redo buttons. Add Ctrl-Y as the hotkey for redo. I don't know why you thought Ctrl-Shift-Z was the usual for redo. Wait, wait. I changed my mind. Ctrl-Shift-Z is way better thant Ctrl-Y. Nice.
I understand the cursor (the red line with the blue arrow thing on top) is meant to display the next frame and, when you move to a new position, APE plays the sound for the interval associated with the next frame. At the moment it mostly does this, but often it shows the frame where the cursor was before you moved it (meaning the picture doesn't change even though you moved the cursor) and when you move the cursor, APE plays the sound from the frame where the cursor was before you moved it. Please fix this, particularly the audio. I want to hear the sound for where the cursor is, not where it last was.
Do a conforming (whatever that is) after doing a "Replace footage". I used replace footage and there was no audio. I closed APE and opened it again, then loaded the project. It did a conformation (if that's what it's called) and the audio on my clip appeared.
Render audio in a manner similar to how you render videos. I can move a video clip, cut it in half, do all sorts of things and APE remembers that it has already rendered the resulting clip(s) and doesn't need to render it again. Even the smallest, inconsequential change (like cutting a clip in half) causes APE to re-render the audio, even though it is unchanged (other than the cut, which doesn't alter the audio). The delays make APE unusable when the audio needs to be re-rendered after every little edit. Change the message on the audio render progress screen - "rendering required files" or whatever it says at the moment means nothing.
If you can't fix the way audio is rendered, at least add something to the info on the clips on the timeline to show which of the time-stretched clips have the audio pitch corrected. As I work-around, I do the editing with "maintain audio pitch" switched off (and put up with the ugly time-stretched sounds), then switch on "maintain audio pitch" when the video is completed.
Add more entries to the "open recent documents" list. Five is not nearly enough, especially when the currently-open project also appears in there. I'd like to have at least the most recent 12 projects.
By far the worst problem is how some of the editing hot keys stop working if you click anywhere outside the timeline. In fact, they stop working even if you click on the grey slider at the bottom or the slider that changes the scale, both of which I would have thought were part of the timeline. So every time I change the scale (for example), I have to click somewhere on one of the tracks in order to get the hot keys to work again, so I can't return to the timeline without changing its status because no matter where I click I end up selecting the thing I clicked on. Yes, I could click on an already-selected clip (say), but this can sometimes be off the screen. At any rate, I have never, ever used a non-timeline-related hotkey (other than Ctrl-S for save) so why not just make it so the timeline-related hotkeys are always active. The exception would be if there is a panel open like Project Assets or the effects editor, in which case the arrow keys, etc, would apply to the panel that is open.
In fact, why not slightly grey out anything on the screen that isn't active. That way it would be clear which bit of the UI you're currently using, and you'll know to (for example) click on the timeline before you can expect any of the keyboard keys to work as expected.
When entering numerical data into fields (such as in the effects editor or the time stretch dialogue box) it would be good if the standard navigation keys worked. Things like the arrow keys, but also tab to move from field to field. At the moment, you have to lift one hand from the keyboard to move and click the mouse, then move it back.
Timeline markers have an arrow at the bottom, but the arrow doesn't point at anything. That's confusing. The point on the timeline that the markers align with is at the left-hand edge of the marker, not the arrow point. Maybe reshape the marker so the point is at the left-hand edge, so the bottom is wedge-shaped rather than arrow-shaped.
Provide the option to show one (or more) tracks from the timeline while viewing in full screen mode.
The video being created can be viewed at normal speed or speeded up, but there doesn't appear to be any way to view the video slowed down. It drives me crazy that I can't view the timing of edits or the action in the clips slow enough to be able to make sense of things. I end up watching it by holding down the right arrow key, but that distorts the sound track so much that synchronisation with the soundtrack isn't clear.
I create my videos in sections. I would like to have a relative time reference that I could set to zero at the start of each section as I work on it. That way I can see the elapsed time from the start of the section.
When I delete the audio from a clip, the gap between that clip and the next clip on the timeline disappears. This makes no sense. I would like it to not do that. I want the next clip to stay where it is. I understand that closing the gap is useful if you're doing J transitions, but the effort of manually closing the gap (when doing J transitions) is miniscule compared to having to move everything after the gap back to where it was (for ever other situation).
The "add tracks" dialogue box should have up and down arrows on the "add" fields, and should close when you hit enter.
There should be an option to add a freeze frame to the project assets without it splitting the timeline ("insert in movie") or needing to be manually imported to the project assets ("export").
The project asset panel needs a serious overhaul. If I right-click on a clip on the timeline, then select "reveal in project", it can't find anything if it's in a folder. If I'm dragging a file to a folder, it's not always clear that it was moved to the folder, and sometimes it doesn't move. And a bunch of other things. Make it work like Windows File Explorer. I want to sort things by name, length, bit rate, date added, etc.
Allow audio tracks to be amplified by more than 6 dB if there's enough headroom. I've had to resort to splitting off the audio and loading it into Audacity (which told me I could amplify by 14 db before clipping occurred). There's no reason for a 6 dB limit if the highest sound level is more than 6 dB below FFFF. By the way, I've discovered a work-around. I now realise I can get more than 6 dB amplification by setting the compressor so it doesn't compress, then cranking up the "makeup".
There is no simple way to create colour mattes based on colours that are in the video image. Please add one of them eye-dropper things to the colour matte dialogue box.
TOPICS
Audio
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Error or problem
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Feature request
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Performance
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User interface or workspaces
Wow. I was told this was the way to communicate with Adobe about ideas for improvements. If so, they're not doing a very good job. Thanks for your reply, by the way, but I'm really not a professional, and many of the things I've raised are bugs. Adobe should want to know about them.
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