How can we improve After Effects?

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ACTUALLY LET US MAKE A DIRECT COMPLAINT

How about instead of making us VOTE for features we want you to repair. You take the money we give you every month and fix the problems. No broken feature should require a popularity contest to get fixed. It's pathetic.

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Jordan Cadby shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

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  • Klo Hsu commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    From a studio-usage perspective on workflows with After Effects comparing to something like Nuke ::
    1. Licensing. Adobe forces you to license in insane bloatware with their software... Your computer probably is 15% worse for just letting it touch your hard drive. On the other hand Nuke is an RLM license system, just like 75% of other VFX apps (even for example BorisFX). Do you need 10 more users ? You'll have all 10 in a new license file faster than your credit card can blink. On Adobe? - " Oh okay you need to attach each license to a fake internal email address just for the privilege of launching my software".
    2. Usability of ASCII file format. *.AEP 's are a pile of legacy garbage and if you want to automate anything about it, under a advanced Motion Graphics or VFX pipeline, sucks to be you. But on Nuke :: Want to search and replace in .nk file? Done before you even finished thinking about it.
    3. Foundry ( they´re also no saints either to be fare ) focused on making Nuke a performance powerhouse. True..It might not feel like its super, when you have 8k nodes with 100 read nodes with 50 layers in each file, but if you did a slightly comparable thing in AE when working with video comping or multipass, you'll be lucky if it doesn't run out of memory just loading your file and crashing your entire system. Good luck trying to use a good amount of shape layers, making some cool motion graphics. Even the simple panel redimension is sluggish as hell. EXR use? Pfff.. a joke, Adobe should be embarrassed about.
    4. First-class Industry OCIO support. pixel-perfect color management is of vital importance in VFX and Motion Graphics, and while AE has an OCIO plugin, it's not even first-party. Pathetic.
    5. Nuke expects to be renderfarmed. AE does not. Sure, there's some AE client rendernode apps, but making them work with whatever licensed plugins you probably use is a nightmare I don't wish on anyone. Basically the answer to "we need to render faster" is "buy a new machine to render maybe 2x faster", not, "use 200 cheap machines to do it in 5 minutes".

    Makes me feel angry and frustrated with Adobe. AE in its core is such a incredible fun and creative software, full of potencial for both the possibilities into both VFX, Video ost Production and Motion. But its now a horrible crippled deformed Frankenstein of a software.

  • MrBeep commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I almost ditched PS over Photopea that opens in a second and works faster.
    Can't wait to ditch AE someday. The only app that is working as expected is Lightroom but this looks like was created from scratch not over old code base.

  • Steven Probets commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    This is the whole reason Apple just binned FCP and re-wrote it from scratch to FCP X. Just start again because there are much better methods of coding to create a more efficient piece of software than re-hashing versions.

  • Jordan Cadby commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    It's the source code for sure... you load up the same exr image sequence into resolve and it plays back in real-time - over a network. you can grade it and add effects etc and it still it plays back in real-time.

    An unfortunate side effect of Adobe adding multi-frame rendering and previewing is that now we can simply just acknowledge that even at its best... its nowhere near close to real-time.

  • Mats Blixt commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    One of the better things Adobe have done in recent-ish years, was the "Just do it" project. Where they fixed a ton of small issues in Photoshop, just added lots of quality of life improvements! I was super happy about this and thought that maybe, just maybe Adobe had actually learnt something. But sadly, have not seen anything like it since. I have tried to communicate this idea to support, but unsurprisingly there's never any reaction to it.

    Amazing new neural filers and exotic features is all very nice! But I think we all can agree that we would rather have a functioning basic version of AE or any other Adobe software first! That has bugs and issues fixed, that's been around for 10+ years!! Is this really such a novel concept, Adobe? Or is the source code messed up to the point where most of your programs are unfixable?

  • Jordan Cadby commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    HELLO, adobe... ironically this seems to be the most voted idea?

    Are you going to buy into your own voting system and do something about it?

  • Mats Blixt commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    @Jordan I have tried to express this to Adobe support as well, which of course they just plain ignored, as expected. Hope you have a great holiday season too and maybe 2022 will be the year when Adobe starts listening... or me just plain switching to a different set of software! 😁

  • Jordan Cadby commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Well put Mats

    Unfortunately, Adobe also seems to also ignore this thread. No interaction, no acknowledgment, and no action.

    Take Care and have a good holiday season!]

  • Mats Blixt commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Exactly how I feel Jordan! A majority of suggestions just get buried here! Feels like it's an excuse for Adobe to go; "no one cares about this problem, so we are just going to not fix it!" I need to work, not waste time keeping track of what problems should be fixed or not... this is also why I am paying for my Adobe software!

  • Jordan Cadby commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    @nuno

    I feel a lot of these issues stem from the shift to a subscription model. I don't recall such critical failings when we paid per release. Now, for some reason, Adobe is fine not vigorously testing their releases. It's very likely that adobe has the next several years' worth of features made and is just drip-feeding them to us. So I'm not surprised people's ideas are being ignored. Once again thanks for the info on "left angle".

    J

  • Nuno Caroco commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    @Joergen, could not agree more... I was involved in the private Adobe PreRelease / Influencer program of After Effects, ( before Adobe closed it ), back in the same period of time has you, 10+ years ago. It was productive, active and funcional, with a mix between the enginners, managers, developers, "AE gurus" and end users with different workflow scenarios, enviroments and experiences. You really could feel the feedback and how productive efficient it was. And then... it ended. And thus, we get these forums in terms of client/user care.

  • Joergen Geerds commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Looking back at the PS beta program I had participated a decade ago, there was an immediate and active and healthy forum dialog between the project managers, (adobe) scientists and developers directly with the beta users, and some extremely useful features came out of that, and bugs were squished based on severity, but usually in the next release.

    the user voice, the adobe forum and every other public facing adobe communication tool appears to be totally neglected and ignored by adobe, and it feels like we are just posting stuff here that will never be seen by anybody at adobe, since we are not even getting acknowledgements.

    Adobe: if you happen to see this, you have a user-interaction problem here. The PM team should communicate with the users that go through the trouble talking about the bugs and issues more clearly and often.

  • Nate Foster commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    I'm kinda agreeing with you on this one, Jordan. I'm completely despising the "popularity contest" feel of this board. To give you an example, I recently ran into a problem in AE that I couldn't solve. I search Google and the top hit was post I made on this forum 2 years ago with no replies and 1 vote (mine). that is not what i call support or feedback.

  • Jordan Cadby commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Hi The Dudes,
     
    Thank you for contributing to my suggestion, although you leave me a little confused as to what your actual point is.
    It is quite clear to me and the rest of the people on this thread that have liked or commented. That I have made a very clear suggestion about Adobe’s ability to solve broken elements of their software…..except for you it appears.
    Can I ask - What in particular about the platform do you think is worth defending in the rigour that you have? From what I see, there are considerable numbers of frustrated paying users who don't actually get listened to? I think I'm speaking for the majority of people who have voted for this thread by suggesting that "the platform" doesn't work.. because adobe doesn't act upon 99% of its contents.
    If you seek further proof of its failings, just take a look at the in-progress section of this forum. The last time I looked, there were 11 things in progress. Several were re-instating features that had been removed from After Affects, most were fewer than 3 votes and I think there were 2 actual bugs. I welcome ALL those changes... but.. they don't seem to represent the VAST NUMBER of other issues and bugs. Also, they certainly don't represent the "requests" with the greatest number of votes.
    As you are already aware, I do make "proper requests". You know this because you have also commented on them today. I'd like to point out that - Adobe have also failed to respond to that thread.
    I honestly don't understand people with your attitude. Do you not make regular payments for a service that doesn’t perform correctly? like the rest of us? Do you not experience these issues?
    Ill state very clearly for the record my attitude to all this - I completely 100% understand why anyone on this platform might want to vent or rant. Its because they have just done hours, or days, or weeks of work... and during that process they have dealt with countless crashes, bugs, problems previewing, problems rendering and random errors from software updates. All the while they use other software applications that seem to suffer from NONE of these issues. After all that, they come on these forums and spend even more of their time (often personal time) and try to explain the latest pointless bug that has occurred... and they get ignored.

    Also, a minor point ‘the dudes’, ironically you appear to have spelt "comprehensible" incorrectly.

    Thank you for annoying me.

  • ben commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Hi the dudes,

    I think the original post isn't just venting, the request is asking to be able to make a direct complaint and change the system. That is a genuine request.

    The capitals obviously are just to communicate frustration which as a customer is fair enough. If you are paying a subscription then you expect your software to work and if there is an issue then you don't expect to have to participate in a popularity contest to get your issue sorted.

    I think Adobe are big enough to not need defending!

  • the dudes commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    How about not posting a toxic complaint in opposition to the platform we got here. We all get frustrated at some point. But instead of venting, why don't you make a proper request that is recomprehensible for the devs?

  • Jordan Cadby commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Hi Nuno

    Thanks for the link to autograph left angle, it looks promising... at least this forum is useful for something!

    J

  • Nuno Caroco commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Maybe what Adobe needs to wake up into fixing certain AE basic features, broken software issues and properly listenting to their end user paying clients, is a proper software competitor.
    Competition is good for business and for the end users in terms of choice and options. Right now there is not much.. but.. its slowly getting there to the point they should rethink some things on costumer care and product upgrade.

    Google for "autograph left angle" a new sofware coming in Q2 of 2022 and Cavalry 2D animation that even features a physics simulation. Not even AE does that natively, without the help of Newton.

    ah... Hey remember when Adobe showed Flash CS5 Physics-lab in 2008/09 to never add it ? (and they could implement that in AE since) - https://youtu.be/UsjzkHlrH-M
    Remember how they could implement Flash/Animate/Character Animator´s bone tool into AE to facilitate body rigging, but never did?

    Thankfully "only" after 15 years they finally made AE work in MP render/preview.

    That being off my chest, there is indeed value into voting for features/bugs and feedback or ideas in these forums, but many times feels like talking to a wall, and no one in Adobe´s software developing team or product management is taking them much in consideration and providing regular feedback here.

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