When Pr and I first met back in '07, we got off to a brilliant start. CS2 saw me through the start-up of my new business, including several big online and wedding video hits along the way.
Then last year I decided to put my editing prowess to creating a YouTube channel for charity. And since then, Pr seems desperate for me to thrust a sword through my monitor and go buy iMovie instead.
I upgraded to Creative Cloud in Feb '15 when I seemed to need the extra programme development to deal with a multi-layered green screen project. That was the biggest, most complex edit I have ever attempted, but (a) it was successful, and (b) it taught me the efficiencies available with sequence-within-sequence editing. Beautiful.
For about 2 months. Then, one day, Media Encoder randomly decided that nesting audio from one seq into another was too time-saving, and instead my speakers should have a mammoth splurging cackle throughout my video. Since I'd been nesting seqs in seqs for several weeks, it took me a while to realise the problem. But the workaround was simple – copy and paste the audio from one seq into the next.
In fact, I began to copy and paste other objects too, such as titles with keyframes animating motion and basic 3D. I used this for the opening credits on a coupl'a months worth of vlogs. Then, suddenly, both Pr and Me decided it was too tricky to render two consecutive uses of titles with keyframes, and would drop the rendering process – sometimes simply closing the programme without ceremony, other times crashing my whole system. There was no workaround to this beyond cutting the titles. Even creating new titles didn't remove the bug.
So, brief recap: February, system happily renders 12 overlaid seqs with applied green screen effects. April, system gives up on rendering the audio from just 1 nested seq. August, system gives up on rendering titles with motion and basic 3D keyframes.
WTF?!
By this point, my partner was getting worried about my regular Tarantino-esque tirades at my system, and suggested that maybe I should buy a better computer to handle the programme. My specs up until this point had been...
* a 2.5GHz Intel Core i5
* 8GB RAM
* 1 TB hard drive
* Windows 8.1
...all of which met or exceeded the minimum system requirements, though I admit they missed the optional Adobe-certified GPU card. So, with my partner's blessing, I went ahead and ordered a brand new system with...
* a 3.4GHz quad-core Intel i5
* 12GB RAM
* a 2TB 7200RPM hard drive
* a 2GB Nvidia GeForce 840A
* Windows 10
Surely Pr and Me couldn't argue with me now?
Well, this morning was my first attempt to boot up the system and give it a whirl. I had an hour to edit a 20sec video, and things were going swiftly. Happy me. All I needed to do was add a Brightness & Contrast filter, and my video would be ready to render. So I open up the reference monitor to check the VC Waveform...
...and it's not there!
In fact, none of the waveforms were there. The only options were composite video or alpha. I went online, Googling for "Premiere Pro reference monitor waveform missing", and found one other post – to this very forums – where multiple users reported experiencing the same problem: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1699429. The first thing you notice when visiting that post is, of course, that the question is currently "Not Answered". No-one appears to have found a workaround beyond multiple reinstalls that suddenly, inexplicably, solve the problem... for a few days. Then the problem resurfaces.
Since I'd been using the VC Waveform quite happily in my reference monitor before now, my response to this would've been to grab that sword again. My brand new system was only saved because of the aforementioned need to be heading somewhere else by the end of an hour.
So, Adobe. Please can you tell me why you don't want me using your products anymore? And then can you reimburse me for all the payments I've wasted on Creative Cloud for this consistently infuriating and hypocritical software that does extremely complex tasks one day, and crashes at simple tasks the next?
Or, better still, can you fix these bugs and let us have an update that works? PFQ?
Yours hopefully...
