I find it fascinating that people still talk about "Adobe" constantly rushing out with tons of new features. Look back at the last couple full cycles ... for Premiere there's been really auto-reframe and the Productions workflow changes. That's about it.
The current head of the video apps brought in a guy a year back to restructure their teams for incorporating bug-identification and stability/performance work earlier in the development process. And basically put most "new feature!" development on hold until they got the program working better. Patrick Palmer brought Ivo and a few engineers to Adobe MAX last year to talk with the ACPs that were there.
From that discussion ... Premiere had a ton of bad and ancient code, along with its legendary history of bugs that had survived through cycle after cycle. The first task was sorting out what to simply junk, what to replace. A LOT of older gear got support removed simply to get rid of bad/ancient code and streamline work moving forward. After that, they went after the long-term bugs and killed most of them.
Next was sorting through some of the stability issues and prioritizing fixes. Some old low-use format/codecs got dumped again to simplify moving forward and lower the amount of time spent bringing ancient low-use stuff up to modern use. Some formats got their support coding completely rebuilt. And other changes.
From that there were two results: 1) the number of bug/stability issues plaguing users was down dramatically across the majority of the user base and 2) those that were left were dang difficult to get after, as they are primarily things that neither their in-house computers nor the further "supply" of computers in their beta program could replicate. In other words, a vastly more difficult group of things to fix. What you can't replicate, you can't fix.
So ... they've instituted a "public beta" program to get the development apps out to more people to check for bugs/performance things. This is through the Creative Cloud app, which for many users now has a "Beta Apps" tab along the left side. Ivo is expecting they'll get a lot more things handled this way, working with a wider array of comptuers/gear/media/workflow.
And finally ... one of the engineers there was one of the ones that read every flipping UserVoice post filed. His biggest complaint? Way too many posts there have nowhere near enough information for them to do anything. "X is broke. Fix it!" doesn't help you at all when X ain't broke on any system you have access to.
He wants data with all UV posts ... the gear in detail, media, storage, OS, effects, any plugins, and what you were doing when something unwanted or unexepected happened. Then they can see where to start looking, and what to even ask for among other users with perhaps similar issues. So for any issues, yes, PLEASE go to that link I gave and give them full details on what's bugging you. Also ... that stuff is collated and sent to the upper managers who determine budgets for engineers and such. Thos people live by metrics, so ... give them some metrics!
As I'm a contributing author on a colorist's teaching site, I spend a lot of time dealing with Resolve btw ... and the people based in that app can give you a LONG list of the issues they're having. As can the Avid users. Ain't none of them perfect, but their imperfections are all different. In the end, they're all just tools. Use the tool what works for you, whichever one it is, or whichever combination it is.
You got clients that need their work before they pay your bills. Take care of the nice clients.
Neil
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