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kris_cave wrote
To be honest, I'm a little disappointed this is kind of thing being posted on the here. I'm no saint, but this kind of talk seems juvenile and counterproductive.
This isn't meant to be counterproductive. This is really just a quick little blowing off of steam.
When you deal with these forums, /r/AfterEffects on reddit, CreativeCOW forums, several Slacks, Discord servers, etc. every day for years (or decades), sometimes certain kinds of threads (and certain kinds of users) get very tiresome. It's nice to just vent real quick before we get back to helping. 
Besides, this thread is set up in such a way that it's unlikely anybody is going to stumble across it that we're discussing. I mean, if somebody is searching these forums, they're already not the kind of person being discussed! 
kris_cave wrote
. That point aside, that shouldn't justify lumping all these people into one category and calling their work "lame-***" and telling them to switch to a different product.
Agreed. I wouldn't call them lame-swear and I wouldn't tell them to switch. As anyone can see from my history (and, really, the history of most everyone in this thread), we point them to beginners resources for AE and are helpful even if we think some of that in our head.
kris_cave wrote:
This is akin to 1st-grade teachers walking into the cafeteria at lunch and openly ridiculing their students for not understanding addition and subtraction.
It's more like ridiculing their students for demanding they do the addition and subtraction for them.
Actually, it's usually even more like 1st-grade teachers complaining that their students are trying to do calculus without taking the time (or listening to the advice) to learn addition and subtraction first.
kris_cave wrote
This conversation easily could've been a presentation of the problem and a discussion of possible ways to address that problem within the community.
Whether it be sticky posts with useful resources for newbies or a strategy to point a lot of these simple questions towards the help, FAQ, or other threads for example.
The problem is that I don't know of any way to address that problem. We have FAQ posts that don't get much traffic. Granted, they could use an update as they haven't been touched much since Todd Kopriva left Adobe, but it's hard to justify the effort if folks aren't going to use them.
I understand what Gutter-Fish was saying about trying to teach someone animation in Maya and they didn't want to learn about polygons and points. I don't know what the solution is to that type of person coming into the forums. I've had countless numbers of people asking to do advanced things and refusing, outright refusing, to get a basic, foundational understanding of how to work in After Effects. They're used to quick and easy phone apps and refuse to understand that After Effects is not like that at all.
Honestly, I don't think there's a good solution to this except for provide links to the right beginning resources and moving on despite the insults that sometimes follow.
kris_cave kris_cave wrote
Cinema4D has the best 'Help' assistance I've ever seen. Right-click on anything in the UI and show that element in the help doc; that's a beautiful implementation that actually got me to use the in-app Help and something like it would be a wonderful addition to the program.
I would LOVE it if Adobe's help could match C4D's. You are so right. Occasional mistranslations from the German aside, it's a fantastic, easy-to-use, resource.
kris_cave kris_cave wrote
I think you guys get where I'm coming from.
I do. If we had threads like this often, I would be concerned too. However, this is the first venting thread I have seen on the Adobe AE forums since I've been a part. And, hopefully, post-venting here, we'll have a bit more patience for our wayward newbies in their own threads.
You're also right that there are millions of tutorials out there. So many of them are awful! Rick has been especially good about calling out bad tutorials and pointing newbies to better tutorial resources. I'd like an updated version of this resource that Todd made. Too many of them are out of date now since they're all from before the new "Preview" replaced RAM preview, but it was a great, one-stop-shop for newbies to get solid resources when starting out.
kris_cave wrote
Do you think this is something isn't getting much traffic because it hasn't been updated recently?
I don't think so. A newbie wouldn't really know the difference. Besides, not that much has changed with how AE works fundamentally since I first started learning on VHS tapes back in version...4...I think? I mean, the UI processing thread being separated from the render thread that happened in CC 2015 was a fundamental change under the hood and the biggest change to AE in decades, but that doesn't really affect how we work (except we can work faster).
Well, pressing spacebar is now a reasonable way to preview. That's a big change, I guess.
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