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Sequence error or a cautionary tale about credit cards and Creative Cloud
Forgive the repetition as this was part of a thread from a few days ago regarding what I thought was a technical issue with my project file. But as it turned out, appears to be an issue when a credit payment to Creative Cloud fails… and I thought I should re-post it so that other might learn from my mis-fortune.
A few days ago I got a Creative Cloud warning that my subscription was due to expire. When I logged into my CC account, I saw that my credit card payment didn’t go through. I had forgot to update it after a recent credit card fraud attempt and the bank gave me a new account. So, that was my mistake, for sure.
So I tried to update my credit card info on Adobe’s site. However, I got an error that said, “Something went wrong on our end, please try again later.” But it also said that my account was being transitioned to a “free account through June {I don’t recall the exact date, but it was about a month away}.” I’m not sure what that meant but I assumed this was some kind of grace period to get my account up to date. This was on Wednesday evening. No problem, I’ll take care of it tomorrow.
On Thursday morning I had forgot to try to update the credit card info before I jumped into the project that I was supposed to finalize and deliver that day. And that’s when I got the following error:
I was using the same machine, with a local drive – so I couldn’t understand what the problem could be. I also learned that someone else in my studio had the exact same problem with another project. Very odd!
As it turns out, it wasn’t a technical issue with my machine or project file. It appears to have been a Creative Cloud subscription problem. Once I got my credit card updated, I was able to open m project without incident. But I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was that I was on deadline and couldn’t open my project. Lots of new grey hairs!
So it would seem that the fear/concern/angst that some have expressed about Creative Cloud may not be unwarranted. Please know that I am not a “cloud basher” and have embraced the business model and (at least the current) pricing model. However, the implementation can have holes. And while my situation is a combination of elements that led to the gnashing of teeth on Thursday may not be the norm, it’s hardly “Power Ball” odds. I can easily see this (or something similar) happening to others.
What really annoyed me more than anything was that the error message wasn’t honest. It should have said that my account was deactivated or something so that I wouldn’t chase my tail. Instead, I lost many critical hours because of the mis-direction. Major fail Adobe!
The really odd thing is that I was able to create a new project, work with it and export out a sequence without issue. It was the existing project that was affected. So the thought of a subscription issue wasn’t on my radar.
I fully take responsibility for not updating my credit card info. But I didn’t think that Adobe would shut me down after just a day or two. What if I was away from email for a few days. Or if my email server had gone down and the message never got to me. Another major fail Adobe. A few days isn’t reasonable enough notice.
So all-in-all, the story ended OK for me and my project deadline. But let this be a cautionary tail to my friends on this forum: Make sure your cc is up-to-date on the CC. And more importantly for Adobe: Don’t screw with my ability to serve my clients! I and others on this forum will drop you like we did Apple.
Production is fun – but lets not forget: Nobody ever died on the video table!
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6 Replies
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Adobe Certified Expert Premiere Pro CS6
Adobe Community Professional -
This definitely sounds like an area that warrants attention…
Plain language messaging as well as the obvious cutoff with no grace period certainly doesn’t jive with the official line on how things are supposed to work.
Have you had any direct contact with Adobe support concerning this experience?
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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Hi Tim,
Yes, i agree that it’s a problem Adobe needs to look into. I haven’t had any contact with Adobe yet – as this all unfolded in the past few days. In all honesty, I don’t even who to contact.
Also, I’m not at all certain that it was an intentional cut-off. While I was searching for a solution, one of the things I did was to isolate the issue – to see if the problem was with the app itself, my project or a system problem on my computer. During that testing, I was able to launch Premiere, create a new project, edit footage, import a PSD graphic and export media – all without incident.
So that test threw me off the trail of it being either my computer or the application itself. I really thought that the issue as a corrupted project or sequence. I tried to import the sequence into a new project and that too didn’t work.
So if anyone from Adobe is reading this, feel free to contact me for more info. I’d love to hear from someone as to why/how this happened.
Production is fun – but lets not forget: Nobody ever died on the video table!
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Yes, I wasn’t implying it was something Adobe did intentionally, but these systems have to be machines that process steps based on input, and I suspect this behavior might be unexpected for them.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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[Steve Martin] “Yes, i agree that it’s a problem Adobe needs to look into. I haven’t had any contact with Adobe yet – as this all unfolded in the past few days. In all honesty, I don’t even who to contact.”
Hi Steve,
I don’t think this is a subscription issue, it’s an activation issue that happens to Premiere Pro sometimes. In fact, that warning should not even appear with the trial.Try this:
Go to Help > Deactivate
Restart Premiere Pro
Go to Help > ActivateSee if that works for you.
Thanks,
KevinKevin Monahan
Social Support Lead
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Systems, Inc.
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Thanks Kevin,
If it ever happens again, I’ll be sure to try that.
But I guess the lingering question remains – it coincided with the subscription issue and went away once I resolved the credit card issue.
And if it’s an activation issue, why wouldn’t the error message just say that? There appears to be something wrong under the hood?
Production is fun – but lets not forget: Nobody ever died on the video table!
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