How we came HATE Adobe in just under a month...

[Sandro Klopfstein]

Ok, time to let off some steam...

I used to be enthusiastic about Adobe's new subscription model and even defended their move to CC in these forums. But that's all gone now. We've subscribed for the complete suite a little over a year ago because from our perspective it seemed like a great deal. We were happy with the CS6 applications and loved the prospect of getting faster bug fixes and support. Turns out none of that eventually came true.
- about three months into using Premiere Pro as our new standard NLE, we started getting random issues with audio playback. While the level meter was still indicating audio being played, not a single beep actually came through. Only a restart would solve the problem. We issued a support ticket but NEVER heard back from any Adobe person. The issue was miraculously some months later (I suppose through an update).
- with this issue seemingly solved, a new random one started to appear. When playing through footage in the canvas viewer, then playing playing stuff on the timeline and back and forth, the image of either viewer would suddenly freeze and just the audio would continue to play. Hitting pause, stop, play, JKL or whatever else we tried, none of it made it stop. Again, just a restart would solve it, until it surfaced again. Ticket was issued and sometime later closed by Adobe without notifying us or solving anything. This issue is was still going on until today but it is now the least of our worries.
- a couple of weeks ago, Illustrator wouldn't open again, ever. When we tried to look wether there was an update available we noticed he Adobe Application Manager crashing right away when opening it. We found out this was apparently a very common issue (think Adobe would have come up with some sort of working fix by now...). We were chatting with Adobe Support people a couple of times who just came up with "solutions" we've already tried before and eventually even started to act like condescending jerks (repeatedly telling us the steps they've been telling us about for ages and ignoring our input, etc). The whole CleanerTool approach was a joke, as well. The Uninstallers crashed right away upon opening them. And the CleanerTool itself couldnt even identify all Adobe products that were installed. A manual clean up also didn't help anything as the newly (under a new admin account and the save mode) installed AAM still crashes upon attempting to open it. So now we've got plenty of work to do and a unintentionally Adobe-free system... and the Adobe support team is letting us waaaaaaaaaaaaaait.

This is ABSOLUTELY UNEXEPTABLE! We're paying customers and we're certainly NOT willing to pay for the continuous screw-up that CS6 CC appears to be! I'd much rather pay the tripple amount of money and get a full licence of NUKEX and SMOKE rather than having Adobe shove me in an early grave.... Unfortunately I've yet to come across a worthy competitor for Photoshop. Does anyone have a suggestion?

Sicerely
An angry Adobe customer

 

[Steve Sherrick]

Sandro, sorry to hear about your experience. It sucks when things come crashing down at the worst time or any time for that matter, so know that most of us here sympathize with the pain you are going through and I'm sure it's putting a strain on business.

The interesting thing about this move by Adobe is that it seemingly puts all their eggs in one basket. Obviously there is a danger to this approach. There are a lot of moving parts. There are 1000's of differing computer configurations being used out there from Macs to PCs to Hackintoshes in all kinds of flavors. I'm sure supporting this is somewhat of a nightmare and I wonder sometimes about the push to always have the latest updated software because this does not always mean good things for every system out there. License issues aside, it's how Adobe will address the support end of things in terms of matching versions of their apps with the configurations of their users. For example, obviously there needs to be an easy to access archive of past versions so if you ever need to roll back due to issues your configuration is having you can do so and wait until a later version to update.

The success of this approach falls directly into the lap of Adobe or any other company that wants to use a subscription based system. If enough people have trouble, it will impact business for them. So, it's in their best interest to address these issues. There are too many alternatives out there to not do it. I have to believe they realize this and will take measures to ensure they reach the market share they are looking for. How does this help you and your situation? It probably doesn't at the moment. But unless yours is an isolated case, there will be more people speaking up and that's usually how things get done. So, they may lose you as a customer in the transition phase but ultimately they can win you back if they address issues with their current system. In the meantime, I would try to get in touch with Adobe contacts that visit this site and see what they can do for you.

 

[Elsie N]

I've had the same issues with CS6 on some projects, that is, losing video but retaining audio during playback. Solution is just to restart and hope. Doesn't happen to all projects all the time, but happens enough to be frustrating.

In my case, I've suspected it could have to do with putting too much of the project load on one disk, suggesting that Premiere in CS6 working with 5k footage, needs larger pipelines to move data in and out and putting processes on different disks might avoid the problem. But I've had no problems with Premiere 5.5 in this regard.

For my needs, the more I look into it, it appears Resolve 10 or 11, Lightworks 11.1, and Redcine X Pro or some combination of the three is the way forward for me.

 

[Sandro Klopfstein]

well, we're on factory set macpros, apart from quadro 4000's and ssds. no hackintoch or even any complicated I/O setups and whatnot (apart from the matrox box that Adobe recently pulled the plug on - but that is one thing we could live with easily if we have to). also, it USED to work. we didn't install any new drivers, updates, etc. either when things started to f** up. so, this really isn't any sort of exotic setup that might leave the folks at Adobe baffled. Plus, the lovely people from Adobe Customer Care just kept repeating the ONE workaround they seemingly have (the one you'll find in just about 10 seconds if you google the problem) even after we've explained them that it didn't work.

Regarding the Adobe people that swarm around this forum, I've addressed some issues in the past few weeks in the other Adobe threads and so far have have yet to hear from Dave.

if I still had the boxed set, I'd throw it out the window!

 

[Sandro Klopfstein]

I've had the same issues with CS6 on some projects, that is, losing video but retaining audio during playback. Solution is just to restart and hope. Doesn't happen to all projects all the time, but happens enough to be frustrating.

In my case, I've suspected it could have to do with putting too much of the project load on one disk, suggesting that Premiere in CS6 working with 5k footage, needs larger pipelines to move data in and out and putting processes on different disks might avoid the problem. But I've had no problems with Premiere 5.5 in this regard.

For my needs, the more I look into it, it appears Resolve 10 or 11, Lightworks 11.1, and Redcine X Pro or some combination of the three is the way forward for me.

we've had it with 2K and 4k prores, HD footage from 7D/5Ds and native r3ds.

oh, and I just realised that, during my short tantrum, I completele forgot to mention that the Adobe Dynamic Link server stopped working some time ago as well. And we couldnt queue exports to be rendered in Media Encoder anymore either. File conversion was the only thing that it was doing...

 

[Elsie N]

we've had it with 2K and 4k prores, HD footage from 7D/5Ds and native r3ds.

oh, and I just realised that, during my short tantrum, I completele forgot to mention that the Adobe Dynamic Link server stopped working some time ago as well. And we couldnt queue exports to be rendered in Media Encoder anymore either. File conversion was the only thing that it was doing...

That reminds me... My Media Encoder has this very long list of failed encodes of a project I spent days and days on trying to get it on a Blu Ray disk. The really bad part was it would almost finish before failing, meaning I had spent hours waiting for the encode to finish only to have it fail toward the end. Finally had to shorten the project, as I recall, just to get it on disk. Fortunately, it wasn't something that was of high importance or I would have been screwed.

 

[Stefan Scherperel]

It sucks that you are having issues, but the reality is we all go through them at some point, whether you are on a mac or PC, cutting with Adobe, Final cut, Avid, or Autodesk there are going to be issues to come up. I have to warn you though, as much as I'm not impressed with Adobe's customer support (only had to use it once) there are many companies that are much worse, including in the list I just made.
You have quite a few issues that have come up at once, sounding like it's leading back to a bigger issues, more likely than not, it's not a bug in the software.
Are you having the same issues on any other system with the same project? If you haven't tried that yet, I would suggest trying it, and then taking the steps to re-install Adobe CC on your system.
Am I an adobe supporter? Oh hell yes, I have been using Adobe producst since Photoshop 6 and adobe premere 5.5 and after effects 5.5 (Not CS and not Pro) and quite honestly I have had my ups and down with them, but over the years collectively those products have made me a lot of money, a lot more than I have invested in them. Are there alternatives, yep. Are they better? Depends on what you consider better. Will I continue to pay $50 month for Adobe's entire collection of tools? Absolutly! For me it's the best deal that has been offered by any software company, because I have found that I use most of the tools in the CC suite. Is CC for everybody? Nope, but it doesn't mean that those of us that use it and make money using it are suckers all being brainwashed by Adobe's attempts to take over the world. But allas, I think this has to do more with the other countless threads about Evil Adobe's plan to steal money from all us Post production suckers.
I hope your issues get worked out and you get back into your workflow.

 

[Chris Harless]

Sandro, By chance do you use any AJA cards in your system?

 

[Sandro Klopfstein]

Sandro, By chance do you use any AJA cards in your system?

no, we use matrox hardware but we were thinking about switching to AJA as Adobe seems to have discontinued the support for Matrox. Would you recommend it? Or did you ask because there are known issues?

 

[Sandro Klopfstein]

It sucks that you are having issues, but the reality is we all go through them at some point, whether you are on a mac or PC, cutting with Adobe, Final cut, Avid, or Autodesk there are going to be issues to come up. I have to warn you though, as much as I'm not impressed with Adobe's customer support (only had to use it once) there are many companies that are much worse, including in the list I just made.
You have quite a few issues that have come up at once, sounding like it's leading back to a bigger issues, more likely than not, it's not a bug in the software.
Are you having the same issues on any other system with the same project? If you haven't tried that yet, I would suggest trying it, and then taking the steps to re-install Adobe CC on your system.
Am I an adobe supporter? Oh hell yes, I have been using Adobe producst since Photoshop 6 and adobe premere 5.5 and after effects 5.5 (Not CS and not Pro) and quite honestly I have had my ups and down with them, but over the years collectively those products have made me a lot of money, a lot more than I have invested in them. Are there alternatives, yep. Are they better? Depends on what you consider better. Will I continue to pay $50 month for Adobe's entire collection of tools? Absolutly! For me it's the best deal that has been offered by any software company, because I have found that I use most of the tools in the CC suite. Is CC for everybody? Nope, but it doesn't mean that those of us that use it and make money using it are suckers all being brainwashed by Adobe's attempts to take over the world. But allas, I think this has to do more with the other countless threads about Evil Adobe's plan to steal money from all us Post production suckers.
I hope your issues get worked out and you get back into your workflow.

Stefan, we tested the audio issue with Focusrite equipment we got from a neighbouring recording studio plus some consumer logitech thingy and it remained the same (we use MOTU firewire interfaces). We couldnt (thank god) "reproduce" the AAM and Encoder/Dynamic Link issue on any other computer. But it seems like those are quite common issues as the Adobe forums are full of debates about it. The only thing that I could think of as a contributing factor apart of Adobe bugs is that it might be some OSX mountain lion issue (that one macpro is the only one running on mountain lion because we prefer snow leopard).

I'll just have to reinstall the macpro from scratch and hope this will do the trick. as for the future, I think we'll swallow the bitter pill and keep the subscription for one license to ensure backwards compatibility and use smoke for everything else. or, I'm not really ecstatic about this, buy a PC and see wether CC runs noticeably better on windows.

 

[Sandro Klopfstein]

haha... we just got news from Adobe support they sent us a loooong list of files spread all over the hard disk to be deleted because their cleanertool and uninstallers wouldn't do the job. in the meantime, I've already reformatted the macpro's harddrive and re-installed every piece of software again. setting things up anew seems to be the fastest way when dealing with adobe related issues

 

[Tom Lowe]

One tip from me: Always save and keep versions of your Premiere project file every day, with the file named individually dated each day. This way, if the file gets corrupted, you always have something to go back to in a worst case scenario.

In other words, if you wake up one morning and your project will suddenly not open, you can go back to the version from the day before and not loose too much.

Doing this saved my ass while editing "TimeScapes".

I think every program has its glitches. I edited the entire movie "TimeScapes" on Premiere, online, at 4K, over a period of 4 months, and only had one real issue. That's better than I'd been expecting.

 

[Sandro Klopfstein]

One tip from me: Always save and keep versions of your Premiere project file every day, with the file named individually dated each day. This way, if the file gets corrupted, you always have something to go back to in a worst case scenario.

In other words, if you wake up one morning and your project will suddenly not open, you can go back to the version from the day before and not loose too much.

Doing this saved my ass while editing "TimeScapes".

I think every program has its glitches. I edited the entire movie "TimeScapes" on Premiere, online, at 4K, over a period of 4 months, and only had one real issue. That's better than I'd been expecting.

oh yeah, I totally agree I've always been anal about saving multiple versions as I go. saved my ass a couple of times I've also started doing the same thing with various states of the system drives. will save me hours of work in case some new driver or buggy software update keeps the system from going steady

 

[Andy White]

Tom brings up a good point here.

I'm surprised that (in general) people don't do iterative saves... the amount of times I've seen a single version of a project/fie name (etc) get screwed up is scary (especially in environments were other people load and save the same file).

One example was a CG studio I worked at and we used a 'WIP' naming system as well as date conventions and the name of the department/artist (plus we had an Alienbrain asset management system sitting on top of that) - so it was really obvious what the file was and super simple to roll back to versions that were undamaged.

The same studio's Admin Dept spent a month on a complete Excel spreadsheet (sitting at the heart of a database) that was to be used by Admin and Production (accessed by Team Supers and Project management)... but, they all kept saving the same version of the file (over itself)... that was a disaster as, when it inevitably was corrupted, there wasn't a version to roll back (as they were not part of the AlienBrain system)... so they had to start again. Had someone simply made a backup copy, wip or safety version, they could have rolled back to that.

On Premiere, I've heard that large Projects sometimes get corrupted, so Tom's advice is sound - but you may already be doing this anyway - I haven't run into anything yet, but all my projects have been small. Being on the PC, I'm considering testing out Lightworks next... just to see what it's like.

Edit - Sandro, just seen your reply, looks like we're both members of the super safe 'save often' club

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

That reminds me... My Media Encoder has this very long list of failed encodes of a project I spent days and days on trying to get it on a Blu Ray disk. The really bad part was it would almost finish before failing, meaning I had spent hours waiting for the encode to finish only to have it fail toward the end. Finally had to shorten the project, as I recall, just to get it on disk. Fortunately, it wasn't something that was of high importance or I would have been screwed.

The product manager of AME - if there even is one - has clearly never had a conversation with professional content creator.

 

[Bobby Farokhzad]

I've said it before on this forum and I say it now, Adobe customer support is among the worst I have ever seen. I for one want nothing to do with creative cloud thank you very much.

 

[Les C.]

haha... we just got news from Adobe support they sent us a loooong list of files spread all over the hard disk to be deleted because their cleanertool and uninstallers wouldn't do the job. in the meantime, I've already reformatted the macpro's harddrive and re-installed every piece of software again. setting things up anew seems to be the fastest way when dealing with adobe related issues

I don't use Adobe on the Mac anymore (just Logic Pro), but ... if you will image your hard drive with Carbon Copy before making changes, and keep your data files on another drive (hopefully backed up also), you'll be able to go back to a known good version in case Adobe's magic turns to the dark side.

I make a block level copy to another hard drive in my Mac Pro - and all my data files are on an external RAID (which gets backed up to a Windows Server using Retrospect).

 

[Sandro Klopfstein]

Edit - Sandro, just seen your reply, looks like we're both members of the super safe 'save often' club

oh yeah. I definitly learnt that the hard way

 

[Sandro Klopfstein]

I don't use Adobe on the Mac anymore (just Logic Pro), but ... if you will image your hard drive with Carbon Copy before making changes, and keep your data files on another drive (hopefully backed up also), you'll be able to go back to a known good version in case Adobe's magic turns to the dark side.

I make a block level copy to another hard drive in my Mac Pro - and all my data files are on an external RAID (which gets backed up to a Windows Server using Retrospect).

yup, that's what we're doing now. just bought a licence. nice and pristine, good to have.

 

[Daniel Pearson]

One tip from me: Always save and keep versions of your Premiere project file every day, with the file named individually dated each day. This way, if the file gets corrupted, you always have something to go back to in a worst case scenario.

In other words, if you wake up one morning and your project will suddenly not open, you can go back to the version from the day before and not loose too much.

Doing this saved my ass while editing "TimeScapes".

I think every program has its glitches. I edited the entire movie "TimeScapes" on Premiere, online, at 4K, over a period of 4 months, and only had one real issue. That's better than I'd been expecting.

Great advice right there.