Dear Maxon

[Flix_799]

Dear Maxon, if you read this, please buy After Effects from Adobe and save us future trouble. Every new version is getting worse and slower. I think this application would be much better developed under Maxon and their team.

I just had this to say.

Thank you.

[Mylenium]

That's funny, considering things are the otehr way around in the financial department and personally I consider C4D just as bad. It's just another app whose software quality has declined over the years and thatz doesn't get the necessary TLC and renovation of features.

Mylenium

[Flix_799]

At least it would have no subscription and nobody would force me to pay for something I do not use. And I would not be concerned with the fact that cinema is as bad as after effects. C4D at least has its exports right. Since recently, AE always have a green drop-frame on the png sequence used in composition. Purge this, purge that,.. I must constantly be careful about that, instead the program does it automatically by itself. That's just the tip of the iceberg, I could go on and on with all the AE bugs.

[Dave_LaRonde]

I'm hoping Blackmagic decides to make an AE competitor.  I bet they'd get things right!

[dj.summitt]

I'm not sure it's fair to say Maxon has their exports right when one of the biggest movement in post is getting a 3rd party renderer.

[P.M.B]

Adam_799  wrote

At least nobody would force me to pay for something I do not use.

Don't count on it.

[Mylenium]

Well, I'm having fun reading your posts. Sorry, but you really sound like an naive neophyte that doesn't even seem to know C4D very well. At the end of the day, rendering is just a very tiny part of the whole workflow and I don't know where even to begin when you say "has it exports right". This may have improved in R18 and R19, but honestly, it was for a long time just as bad as AE was - Quicktime broken, issues with PNG and TIFF savers, the renderer producing incompatible PSDs that couldn't even be opened in Photoshop. Need I go on? And not to speak of the many defunct or at least quirky 3D features like slow and buggy deformers, Cache objects not working and what have you. Maxon really doesn't do many things much better, it's just that at times you may not encounter any of those issues or be able to circumvent them using another tool. That's about the only thing that sets it apart - in AE you often only have exactly one way of doing things and are screwed when it doesn't work. Maxon taking over AE or developing their own compositing tool therefore doesn't mean at all that things would improve. A serious bug in the wrong place would still make it impossible to get work done. If thingts were that easy, we'd already have another company producing something like AE, but alas, many have tried and more or less failed. It's not that simple.

Mylenium

[Flix_799]

So far I have not had any problems with exporting at C4D (PNG, Targa, Tiff, PSD - everything works perfectly). For quicktime I do not know. And I don't know why someone would export in quicktime//video file these things. Isn't it better to render these things as sequences?

You say: "This may have improved in R18 and R19"

Well, you see, C4D every year became better and better. While in AE is vice versa. Every year is worse and worse

My point is still that after effects are going down every year (I'am using them from cs2). I'm doing a lot of daily TV commercials with short deadlines and these bugs in the export are giving me trouble. On daily basis I use both C4D and AE and I see the difference. AE is far behind C4D in the stability and bugs. Not to mention the policy of paying. I hope someone will create a similar program (Blackmagic, Maxon...whoever) I just do not want to pay more for this pile of bugs.

[P.M.B]

Why do you think it is that you believe this is the place to write an open letter to Maxon?

If you are producing many commercials a day why have you not found a way to avoid the bugs?

Why haven't you reverted to an earlier, less buggy, version after effects?

Why are you still allowing yourself to be "forced to pay for something do not use"?

I doubt very much you can answer to these questions.

I can tell you from experience it takes a special kind of person to live on their own terms.

With that I might suggest to you that you move your "open letter" to the C4D forums.

I wonder why you didn't post it there in the first place?

So many questions.  And I know the answer

[dj.summitt]

So strange to me when people prefer Maxon's system of paying over Adobe's. I remember pre-CC when there was a $3,000 barrier to entry to be able to use AE and Premiere. Then another $3,000 for C4D. If you started paying full price the day CC was released (which I don't think you could, I think there was a special price the first year but I digress) you have spent, as of this month, $2,600 for your subscription which has covered CC, CC 2014, CC 2015, CC 2017, and CC 2018. If on that same day you bought CS6 Master Collection it was retailing for $2,599. So you could use 5.5 year old software if you want. You'd saved, precisely, $1.

Wait, I forgot about tax.