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Is it just me?
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No – the problems we saw occurred long before we started the vfx shots.
Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk -
[Tom Sefton] “All the footage was stored on gtech studio xl raids that had plenty of space, and we were editing on Mac Pro 2013s – either 6 or 8 core with 32 or 64GB of ram and max GPU.”
Have you ever tried Premiere Pro on a PC? Just curious. Having said that someone reported a lot of problems when using Premiere Pro on a Mac but the problems were traced back to Safari being opened. Once Safari was closed the crashes went away. I am not saying that is what is causing your system to crash.
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[Simon Ubsdell] “Overall your experience, while incredibly frustrating, sounds atypical.”
Not in my experience.
I just a couple of weeks ago I FINALLY got untangled from the Adobe Subscription mess I’ve been in for the past few years. It took me three additional phone sessions over the past 1.5 months.
I had to make two calls and then unscribe the week prior to my anniversary date for one of my phantom subscriptions (the one they could usually locate), after telling them I wanted to stop ANY AND ALL ADOBE SUBSCRIPTIONS. I THEN – waited a month – and sure enough – I got billed again for the phantom subscription – only when I again called about THAT was Adobe able to suddenly locate the second billing subscription (which was under the same email ID I’d been giving them ALL ALONG in my communications with them.)
It’s as if because there were two “accidental” subscriptions – one was functionally buried behind the other and wouldn’t show up in their system. (maybe. Who knows. I’ve spent hours and half a dozen long drawn out phone calls trying to get this fixed.)
This month, July 2017 is the first time in 3 years I have managed to get my auto-draw payments going to Adobe down to Zero.
(I lit an extra firework on the Fourth yesterday in celebration.)
Again, it’s a fine program that appears to work well for many people. But the entire back end off-shore billing operation is functionally AWFUL in my direct personal experience.
May you happily let Adobe bill you forever, feel it’s totally worth it – and never have to disentangle yourselves from them financially. And if you do, I pray you’ll have a better experience than I did.
Debating whether it’s useful to try to recover the two years and $220 they billed me for something I never touched – or to just lick my wounds and count my blessings that it’s OVER now (save the “special subscription offers” that keep arriving.
Good luck.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Bill Davis] “[Simon Ubsdell] “Overall your experience, while incredibly frustrating, sounds atypical.”
Not in my experience.”
I didn’t actually mean the tech support part of it.
I’d be more than inclined to agree that Adobe just haven’t got a handle on this at all. Which given the subscription model, is frankly not good.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Simon Ubsdell] “I’d be more than inclined to agree that Adobe just haven’t got a handle on this at all. Which given the subscription model, is frankly not good.”
Yeah, well. as with many profit driven businesses – customer satisfaction will NEVER be a priority unless and until it can be proven to effect the bottom line.
Add the fact that every month that a user does their work inside a “than you for letting us control of your IP” subscription model – the ability to leave gets more and more difficult as the months pass.
I have a modest 5000 or so photos from the past few years that I’ve edited/enhanced via Lightroom.
And those hundreds of hours of work are now dead to me.
Oh well. My fault. I simply should have found an alternative sooner.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Bill Davis] “Yeah, well. as with many profit driven businesses – customer satisfaction will NEVER be a priority unless and until it can be proven to effect the bottom line.”
To justify their marketing claims about the value to customers of the subscription model, they should have at the very least pumped serious amounts of money and effort into support by now, which there is absolutely no sign that they have done.
Meanwhile the pace of development of the flagship products has clearly dropped, along with quality standards in some cases. At the same time they are expending a lot of effort into finding new ways to monetise the customer base.
It’s not looking pretty.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
Bill, this post reminded me to cancel a temporary account I had set up a couple months ago. (Thank you for that!)
On a month-to-month agreement, I could login and cancel in 4 clicks from the account management panel on adobe.com: the first to start canceling the plan, the second to answer a survey question why I was canceling, the third to move on from the exit survey to the cancel page (where they present other options, like the Photoshop package and single-app subscriptions), and the fourth to really cancel.
I know this doesn’t change the horror story you had getting your account cancelled, but I think Adobe has finally done the right thing and made it as easy to cancel online as it was to sign up in the first place.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Bill Davis] “Add the fact that every month that a user does their work inside a “than you for letting us control of your IP” subscription model – the ability to leave gets more and more difficult as the months pass..”
That’s just your personal experience/opinion though, not a fact. On the flip side, PPro has been my main NLE for over three years and if I canceled my subscription tomorrow it wouldn’t be a problem, but the types of projects I generally work on are probably very different than the types of projects you generally work on. If work that needs to be done in PPro comes around again then I’ll just restart my subscription.
IMO lack of competition is the big thing that makes people feel like they are locked into a certain system, not accounting methods. For example, many Avid users see the Adrenaline days as a low point with the company but they still felt compelled to spend 10’s (if not 100’s) of thousands of dollars on Avid’s products because they didn’t think any viable alternatives existed (‘stuck’ with MC, no subscription required). Once FCP Legend was considered a ‘good enough’ alternative to MC then you saw the defections start to happen in relatively short order.
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[Simon Ubsdell] “Meanwhile the pace of development of the flagship products has clearly dropped, along with quality standards in some cases. At the same time they are expending a lot of effort into finding new ways to monetise the customer base.”
Not to be too rah-rah Team Adobe here, but that’s not actually clear to me. How do you measure the pace of development? Adobe is now doing 2-3 minor updates per year, versus their old cadence of 1 major update every 12-18 months. No one individual update feels that big anymore, but there are a lot more of them in the same amount of time.
Also, I believe that some of the development that’s happening now would have been harder to justify without subscription: specifically, resolving some of the significant technical debt [link] that’s accumulated in After Effects like barnacles on the hull of a ship over the last two decades. The obviously visible progress in Ae amounts to little, but I believe there’s been a lot of under-the-hood progress that will pay dividends for years to come… any day now. This is a project that should have been started ten years ago; I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this work began at the same time that Adobe moved exclusive to Creative Cloud.
I definitely see the argument on quality assurance; it does seem that the latest releases are buggier than the releases of years past. Of course, on the other hand, there are several big factors at play here: 1) the complexity of the DVA applications has increased significantly in the last decade; 2) the computing environment these apps need to work in has become a lot more turbulent. More frequent major OS releases on both desktop platforms and a big shift in systems design means that developers need to run just to keep up; and 3) as the user base widens, a huge number of new use cases, setups and hardware configurations that require testing are springing up. But none of that excuses something like the recent Premiere Pro media cache bug.
Finally, I’d agree that documentation has suffered and support does sound abysmal. I haven’t actually tried it. Is there even one person here who has had a very positive Adobe support experience that didn’t require intercession from Kevin or a member of the development team?
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “Not to be too rah-rah Team Adobe here, but that’s not actually clear to me. How do you measure the pace of development? “
I’m probably just being grouchy (again), but I was (probably over-)reacting to two things.
a) The fact that the After Effects performance issue is still very much outstanding. The re-architected solution may well be just around the corner, as you say, but it’s starting to feel just not good enough that we haven’t properly seen the fruits of it yet.
b) I was hugely underwhelmed by the “new” Title Tool in Premiere. I’m sure I’m not along in thinking they seriously dropped the ball on this one. Better to have done nothing than to have done what they have done.
But as I say, it’s just grouchiness. What is undeniable is that support is totally inadequate from everything we keep hearing about it. That is something that should be enhanced with the subscription model but the signs are it’s being downgraded yet further.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki
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