Saving Workspace bug STILLLLL not fixed. this is ridiculous

[paulollinger]

The bug that has plagued many people for multiple years now is still not fixed as of the 2020 version. This is a joke.

I move all of my panels to where I want them, right click on my personal workspace, click "Save Changes to this Workspace", quit Premiere, re open Premiere (doesn't matter new project or the same project), and all my panels are in different places again even though I am on my same personal workspace. Have tried making new workspaces, doesn't work. I just got a brand new Macbook Pro and installed Premiere for the first time, so its not some old preference file or something screwing it up, its a bug that Adobe just doesn't care about it seems.

[ah_photo]

At this point I'm assuming it won't be fixed unless there is a complete infrastructure overhaul to the app and workspaces.

That said I have dealt with this issue since, 2017 or 2018 build I want to say (it's been around forever) and I think I have a pretty good sense of how and why this happens. Allow me to divulge the obsurd level of nerd-ity I have learned about this issue, and unfortunately it is two-fold.

ISSUE 1: When you first get Premiere, it comes with certain default workspaces (Editing, Color, Audio, etc.). These workspaces Premiere seems to hold near and dear to its heart (at least as of 2017 onward when this issue started happening). Every time Premiere boots up, it checks to see if these workspace names exist. If it can't find but one, then it goes into panic mode and does a few things:

• Return all default workspaces
• Return the workspace toolbar back to its default state
• Moves any workspaces that don't belong in the toolbar by default, into the Overflow menu.

And yes, this is obviously all quite annoying. That said, if this is the specific issue you are experincing, the resolution here is to never delete or rename default workspaces. It's ok to modify them, it's ok to put them in overflow/hidden. However if you delete or rename a default workspaces so it doesn't exist anymore, this reset will happen.

ISSUE 2: I'm not sure if this is because Adobe tracks workspace panels by panel name, but panels such as the Project and Timeline panels can be subject to being popped out. It's possible that a workspace is looking for a panel like "Project- MyGreatProject" and then when you open a new project, the panel name is different because the project name is different, maybe that's what's throwing it off.

Unfortunately i haven't found a way around this yet, and usually I have to drag the panel into the location and save the changes, and repeat on a per project basis. You might be able to enable importing workspaces from projects: Window > Workspace > Import Workspace From Projects. to avoid this, but personally I really don't like this feature as I like having my workspaces consistent across projects, so I leave that disabled and tend to "deal" with the issue per above.

But yeah, it's a bummer. I used to check these forums every update to see if it would be fixed and at this rate I've given up, unless like I said Adobe completely re-works the app with a new UI and infrastructure (which Premiere might be due for a little bit).

Maybe one silver lining is Adobe acknowledged Issue 2 in their Known Issues list for 2020, but personally their suggested workaround of resetting to saved has never worked for me, at least not in 2019 (haven't done a whole lot of work in 2020 yet)

[R Neil Haugen]

Yea, this is annoying. Sometimes, I'll close a project, open another, and all workspaces are as I want them. Next time I open a project ... some are just wonky. So yea, I'll hit the "reset to saved layout" option which often sets them back to my saved setups.

But sometimes ... "reset" does something odd instead.

It's been fixed in some releases then popped up again in a different release.

Awh111 has good advice for now. Modify the "shipping" workspaces to what you need, save the workspace from the Workspaces menu. That will tend to get somewhat better behavior.

At the Adobe MAX conference in LA a week back, I was a TA (curiously more for Ae labs than Pr). Also ... the ACPs in attendance had a pre-con day together including time with many of the app team members. I got to meet Ivo Manolov, who DVA Program Manager Patrick Palmer (also in attendance) had brought in a few months back to rebuild the Premiere team to ensure getting at bugs and stability/performance issues improved. So far he's completely reorganized their engineer team setup, and amazingly, all the engineers seemed thrilled with the changes. And feel they're smacking them down far faster than in the past.

Ivo noted that the good thing is they're after things. The bad news ... yea, realistically, they've got a long list to get after.

And this is one of the upper items. We specifically talked about this, with a table of maybe 10 heavy Premiere users/teachers and Patrick, Ivo, and a couple engineers. From what they said, there are actually several things that can trigger this behavior that they've already found. And quite obviously, more to find. But ... they are working on it.

And yea, every ACP there has their own problems with this. So we grilled them on it very directly.

They do seriously request that any users with ANY problematic behavior please fill out detailed reports on the UserVoice system, including the computer specs, apps also running while Premiere was open (yes, there are occasional inter-app issues), the media involved, and the exact steps taken to bring up or demonstrate the issue.

As Premiere runs on a wider set of hardware and media than any other major NLE, they're having a great time trying run down every possible cause for every issue. For many issues, even with a decent sized team working on various Premiere sections from the "regular" app to Team Projects, Shared Projects, the "Hollywood" group ... many things that are affecting some subset of users cannot be reproduced in-house.

They need all that data the users can provide. And one of the engineers present was one of the guys who reads nearly every UserVoice submission himself. He was also clear ... many of the UV posts they receive just say "I'm having this issue" in very few words ... which isn't very helpful in all. It gives a number to the percentage having the issue but doesn't help them find the issue.

And the problems with stability/bugs/performance are behind the moves to drop the support for older equipment and some low-use media formats. They want to concentrate engineer time on the more major current gear and media out there.

Neil

Adobe UserVoice Bug /Feature form: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro