Azzie,
Yea, that is a pain. Big one. Of course, neither I nor anyone else just seeing a post from someone can know the history of the contacts they've had about it with staffers ... or even if they have. So we start from basic troubleshooting 101.
I've heard a comment that the only thing worse than Adobe's tech support is their manuals. Can't disagree. Product Support manager Kevin Monahan always tells people to ask for the Video Que as soon as you get to a live body whether on chat or phone support, as otherwise, you get the generalists ... been there done that. Someone just going down a prepared sheet is a bit different from someone with some actual knowledge of the specific program.
And I've often wondered how much communication there is between tech support and the development teams. I know product support for the video apps (Kevin) is in pretty constant contact with the teams, but ... dunno about the tech support staff.
At Adobe MAX, I and a number of the other ACPs got to visit with Patrick Palmer (head of Adobe video apps), a couple engineers, and Ivo ... who Patrick brought in last summer to re-build the Premiere team to work better and faster at bug/stability prevention, testing, and fixing. Ivo was pleased with the massive list of bugs they'd knocked off already, some going back several versions. The engineers were thrilled with the new system and methods as they were knocking stuff out left and right that used to take a lot more time.
And ... Ivo also made it clear, they've a long, long list yet to go through. With most of the easier to diagnose ones already handled. There are several issues they have to deal with to get through the rest of the bug/stability problems and you're probably very aware of all of them. First, some of the code is rather antiquated, some new, and ... that doesn't always work so well together. Second ... some of the code is old enough no one really remembers the details as it was hashed through. So sorting out that stuff ... what does it specifically do, and how? ... even just to replace it ... is a right royal pain. But they're going after the old stuff.
Which leads right to another issue. They've a lot of ancient effects that some section of the user base is still using. But it's ancient code, effects used by a small percentage of the user base, and ... it seems ridiculous to rebuild that section when there's already newer and (for the vast majority of users) better tools to do that with. So they're slowly going through and ... some will get rebuilt. Some ... will simply get dumped. They have to modernize that code. (And yea, that's gonna tick off some users.)
And Premiere works on the widest base of gear, media, and workflows out there. Which is another issue. Adobe has a fair number of computers of both major persuasions in-house, and they've got a beta program of unspecified numbers which they do use. But ... that's still only a very, very small subset of the full range of gear, media, and workflows that are used with the app. So, many of the bugs and stability issues hitting users they simply can't replicate in-house.
And for those, they need the most detailed reports filed on the UserVoice system as possible. Those reports are read by an engineer ... every one. One of those guys was also there at the discussion. His biggest problem? Way too many UserVoice reports are simply "X ain't working fix it" sort of reports. Pretty useless other than for the metadata that X is having a problem. But nothing he can even try to sort out for troubleshooting purposes.
He did remember a couple of mine. It probably won't shock you that my bug reports are rather detailed. But he said, those were very useful ... he could know exactly what I was doing, on what gear, and ... what went bonzo. Because there's so many things that are just nuts about this software on gear mess ... like a couple versions back, all of a sudden a decent chunk of users were having about four different issues. It got sorted that this subset was mostly on Windows. But it was driving the engineers nuts. They couldn't replicate and they couldn't see any commonality that would typically lead to the problems. Especially ... all four (or whatever number it was) very different issues at once.
Finally, a user posted on here that he'd sat down and one by one removed every running app from his machine, rebooted and launched Premiere ... no change. Then went through removing related files by those apps, incuding DLLs. You know how many freaking files that is, remove one, reboot, test? Sheesh, that guy was dedicated.
When he removed the Microsoft dll for their OneDrive applet/system, voila, Premiere suddenly worked like a charm. Replaced the onedrive.dll file, dog ... remove, run like a champ. So he posted here, several others with that subset of issues tested and voila! ... they were working again. So we ACPs were posting to everyone with about any issue, try removing that onedrive.dll file. It was amazing how many users got better performance.
And the engineers were then able to figure out what the interference between onedrive.dll and Premeire was. But ... I'm still curious about that one. I'm on PC, and had none of those issues. With onedrive.dll on my machine, it wasn't a problem, while on many others, it was a major pain. Crazy.
So ... please ... post your troubles in detail on the UserVoice system so the engineers get them directly. (This forum is primarily user-to-user, not a 'tech support' system.) And even better, come back here and post a basic explanation of the troubles you are having and a link to the UserVoice post you made so anyone else can go over there and upvote.
That would accomplish two very worthwhile things ... first, the engineers get better data (and they do occasionally get back to people posting good reports asking for further comments) ... and second ... all UserVoice reports are collated and delivered to the upper managers who decide budgets. Those folk live by metrics. Give them some metrics.
Neil
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