This is reminding of how pissed off I am with Adobe recently after using After Effects a lot, documentation, or lack thereof. It’s really hard to find instructions on what a given effect does, or how to use it. Each effect in the effect panel in After Effects itself has an about button in a context menu, but it’s a credit for the author of the effect which is useless and weird anyway because aside from some exceptions the credit is ‘Adobe’ . There’s no locally supplied electronic document for the user manual, it’s all online. That’s frustrating enough, but there doesn’t really seem to be any one single user manual, there’s lots of different things with similar names but with widely varying degrees of detail. Sometimes if you happen to accidentally stumble on to the right section of Adobe’s site that has a list of effects and also details about them (there’s at least one page which just lists them) the degree of detail is variable in the extreme. One effect I tried to use didn’t have any user reference and the best I could find on Adobe’s own website was a dead link to a forum post (not Adobe’s forums, a random internet forum) which I was eventually able to find myself through Google and then recover the video via youtube (the original of course was long since not on that site). That video also, while very helpful, wasn’t even entirely correct because the author of the effect responded to the forum post many years ago to correct some incorrect information in the tutorial.

I was already furious at this fucking joke of an attempt at documentation of their own software, but I looked up more videos, all from around 2008-2009ish and in those videos, the user was running the Adobe Creative Suite software that used to come in a box before Creative Cloud and they were able to open up a real user manual that came with the software which had documentation for the very effect that they were able to browse to demonstrate some of the concepts for its proper use. WTF!? They had documentation already written and then revoked access to it! Why!? What’s the point? Ant they have the documentation for the effects in some form albeit varyingly useful, on their website, why can’t they just collate it in to a PDF and package with the application download? Resolve does, I use it often. It’s so unprofessional to rely on random internet forum posts from decades past in lieu of proper documentation. People lament users not RTFM well I literally couldn’t.