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Three things I really hate from AFX
First of all: I love AFX and I like the most of the newer features done in the last releases. But there are some things I’ve been waiting for way too long to be fixed / improved and the longer I wait, the more I dispair.
Three things I really dislike from AFX:
1. Curves editor
For instance: Why do the curves look so akward when appling „separate dimensions (x,y)“ to linear keyframes? What the hell! Let’s be honest. If someone has been working with C4D or AvidDS (two softwares I know / knew quite well) or other softwares, will perfectly understand what I mean. The curves editor is one of the weakest things of AFX. It is complicated in handling and unlogical to browse, find and select the curve you want to edit and so on.2. Mask visibility
Despite of existing the „cycle mask colors“ setting, the most of the default colors are to pale to have a good contrast on screen: they are not usable. Since I don’t want to change the colors of the labels I need to edit them one by one very often. There has to be a way to improve the standard visibility of them.3. Render Queue
Again compared to other software: This time to Compressor. At Compressor you can aply „reverse sort orther“. Then you have the newest render at the very top, the older will be placed below. I hate to scroll down every single time I need to play out since I usually do not delete the render history (to be able to check the rendertimes compared to other settings, computers, plugins and so on).Please AFX developers, start a survey to ask users (for sure, not only me) what they think about the weakest AFX usability points. Looking forward to read your opinions.
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7 Replies
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Hi David,
I agree with all your points. The curve editor could use another look, I often manually changing the color of masks to improve their visibility, and a sortable render queue would be very cool.
Adobe does read and track every single feature request, so that’s the best way to get your good ideas in front of the developers. I’m sure you could find a few people here to join you:
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
David –
There already is one, called the Feature Requests, Bug Reports, page at Adobe. They base the changes in the upcoming revs based in part upon the volume of requests for certain features, such as yours.
Here’s more info on how best to get Adobe moving on things you find deficient:
https://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2009/08/feature-requests-bug-reports-a.html
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
I hear you- the best way to be heard is to post all this stuff on the Adobe site. Even if at times it may seem that the folks there don’t listen, I know they do… right Todd Kopriva?
Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist -
Great points,
Funny enough I’d just emailed Adobe about improvements and one of them was the graph editor.
I’m an CG animator and so most of my work is in Maya. I use the graph editor a lot in Maya and I find it really nice to use.
I’ve used AE for quite a few years but really never had to do much in terms of animation in it. Yesterday I spent about 2 hours trying to figure out the graph editor. I came to the conclusion that it’s really, really clunky.
Why has it got two different graph modes? One for speed and one for position. You can achieve both of these using one graph.Having pixels per second on the vertical line and frames per second on the horizontal is really confusing and as far as I know not necessary.
Surely you just need the frames per second on the horizontal and the pixel position on the vertical? Thus allowing you to dictate how fast your object goes and at what point it reach it’s destination.
It seems like the graph editor in AE has been this confusing way for years so I doubt they’ll change it but you never know.
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> Even if at times it may seem that the folks there don’t listen, I know they do… right Todd Kopriva?
Yep.
There is no better way to tell us what you want than to do so here:
https://www.adobe.com/go/wishThose requests go straight to my inbox. Contrast that with threads like this on a forum, which we may or may not see.
We meet regularly to talk about what features to work on next, and I use the “votes” that come in through the feature request form as the primary set of information for making my case.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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BTW, I can’t ever promise any specific feature in a future version, but I will say that we very recently made some changes in the version currently under development that should address the primary complaint here about the Graph Editor. This change was made based on feedback through the feature-request form, which we then validated by having conversations with some customers to see what they wanted. A major gripe that we heard was that the default display of the speed graph for spatial properties, which confused and frustrated people.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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Wow, I’ve got to say if there’s one thing better than great new features in any app, it’s direct feedback from the developer.
The saying “people buy people” sums this up. The fact that Todd has taken the time to reply is something I rarely see in large companies these days and very comforting to know that Adobe are listening.
Thanks Todd, I look forward to what the team have up their sleeves.
Peter
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