Scroll Acceleration from Mojave ruining my Pro Tools experience

[sebaba001]

Hello All!

For a while I've been working from home with a painful Pro Tools 10 + Windows 10 (incompatible) combo. My setup gave me loads of issues, so I decided to invest some money into something more recent and better, so I bought a new Mac Mini and upgraded to Pro Tools 2019.5.

Pretty much everything has been great so far... except ONE little (huge) detail, that almost makes want to go back and work on Windows to finish this project.

Mojave and other recent Apple OS's seem to have some sort of scroll acceleration integrated in them that is not easy to get rid off. I found different apps (and chose one of them, "Smooze") that help specifically with the SCROLL wheel acceleration, but!!! It doesn't help me when I scroll in Pro Tools without the scroll wheel. This is extremely problematic.

So, in practical terms, what does it mean? Well, let's say I have a bunch of clips I want to grab and select, and some of them are slightly off screen. As I am grabbing these clips, and my mouse goes slightly off the editing screen to the point where my timeline starts scrolling, it JUMPS LIKE CRAZY. I am talking about jumping over 10 minutes in the timeline in less than one second. This completely ruins my workflow. It's almost impossible for me to work without every dragging or grabbing or selecting something slightly off screen. I lose so much time zooming in and out trying not to accidentally ever pull my mouse just a tiny bit off the side so I don't fly miles away.

This problem doesn't happen in any other app. Is anyone having the same issue? Anyone knows of a way to disable scroll acceleration period? (not just scroll wheel, but the act of scrolling through dragging also) This only really affects me on Pro Tools. Every other app works fine. I work in different studios and I've used over 7 different setups and none of them has this issue, but also none of them has Mojave or PT 2019.5, not sure which one of the two is the culprit of this annoyance.

Right now I am very frustrated and I spent a lot of money to be stuck with an almost unworkable machine with a very silly, unasked problem.

If anyone knows of a solution, or at least is sharing the same issue, it would be comforting and helpful to hear from you. Thanks.

[OpiZA]

Completely agree with OP. The performance is so much better that it actually hinders workflow considerably. Unfortunately don't have a solution but interested to hear if anyone has a hack-around

[Darryl Ramm]

What exact mice and/or touch pads are you using?

The scrolling I think you are talking about can happen quickly but you should notice you have some (sensitive) control by moving the hand cursor once you get outside the edit window area, very small movements there change that scroll seed. If your mouse is for some reason jumping far enough out then you'll see huge speed. Is there something else wrong with the mouse where it's jumping around? or it's lagging a bit so you miss that transition as the mouse leaves that window area?

[migueldgoncalves]

Been using SteerMouse for years. It allows you to set the wheel sensitivity and acceleration for vertical and horizontal scrolling separately

[sebaba001]

Hi all, thanks for the responses.

@Darryl Ramm:
I am on SteelSeries Rival 301 right now, I also have a Razer DeathAdder laying around but I prefer this one. Nothing wrong with the mouse itself. And yes, I've noticed that if you move your mouse ever so slightly outside the edit window area, it will move slowly, but if you move it a little bit further then it will accelerate heavily. My problem is the area in which it accelerates heavily is really small compared to my screen. I have a 22 inch screen, and that little acceleration area is probably less than half an inch. Meaning that if I lower my sensitivity too much in order to be able to control it well there, it would take me forever to mouse comfortably throughout the entire edit window. I am wondering if Avid/PT can actually do something about this acceleration or at least have it as an option which you can turn off an on for next patch, or if it goes beyond their powers and it's a mac issue.

@migueldgoncalves
I'm using Smooze and tried different softwares for that, it doesn't quite fix the problem, it only works for the mouse wheel or magic pad, doesn't work with the naturally occurring scrolling from dragging your mouse outside the edit window while making a selection.

Apparently when you connect a magic mouse, in the "Accessibility" options there seems to be something that allows you to turn off the scrolling acceleration period, but it doesn't work/exist for non magic mouses. The thing is, I really hate apple magic mouses as they are not ergonomic for my hand shape and cause me a lot of pain after a few hours of work, so that is not an option. Maybe someone knows a way to trick the mac into believing it's a magic mouse that is plugged in while you're using a normal one? In order to activate that option...

Well, hopefully more people will come out and mention this issue so Avid sees it.

[1m1]

What method are you using to zoom in and out in the edit window? Maybe if you used a fast way to get all of the items onto the screen that you want to select that could be a solution.

I've never noticed having the issue that you are having but I'm thinking it's because I always zoom to where the items I want to select are visible. Not in front of a machine at the moment to see if my rig behaves the same as yours.

[BScout]

Have you tried the Engine software from Steelseries to modify the mouse. It does per application adjustments.

And yes, I think the problem is with your mouse. All the Logitech, Kensington and Microsoft mouses/trackballs have no issue (not to mention the obvious Apple ones)

[sebaba001]

Originally Posted by BScout

Have you tried the Engine software from Steelseries to modify the mouse. It does per application adjustments.

And yes, I think the problem is with your mouse. All the Logitech, Kensington and Microsoft mouses/trackballs have no issue (not to mention the obvious Apple ones)

I have tried it, but it is not a mouse acceleration issue, neither it is a scroll wheel acceleration issue, it happens exclusively on Pro Tools and it happens with different mouses from different brands. It doesn't happen on any other application. The issue is Mojave has built in scrolling acceleration which in most cases only apply to your scroll wheel or magic pad/mouse. The way Pro Tools behaves is you can scroll in a different way than in most other apps, you can scroll without the wheel and without dragging the scroll bar, you can scroll simply by selecting inside the edit window and dragging the selection towards any edge of the edit window. This means that the only options for turning off acceleration that MacOS's gives us are not useful for this particular scenario. Different people have different workflows, and in mine, this small issue is particularly annoying and slows me down heavily. This issue doesn't exist in previous operating systems, being a recently new issue that affects a particular scroll behavior that is pretty unique to Pro Tools, maybe Pro Tools can patch it in the future.

I think I will do a video to show the issue so all of you can understand exactly what it is, as I see some people confuse it for something else. It's a bit hard to describe a particular type of scrolling, especially with English being my 2nd language. Say, if you started selecting a chunk of text in this website, and you went down off your screen selecting that text, you'd notice the scroll bar start moving down with your mouse, with acceleration motion. That acceleration motion is 100 times stronger/steeper/more sensitive in the case of Pro Tools, compared to Google Chrome for example.

@1m1
To Zoom in and out I mostly press R and T, feels like the fastest method for me. I am currently doing what you suggest, but it's slower in many cases, it's adding an extra unnecessary step to a critical part of my workflow. I am using my mouse wheel a lot more also, which I usually don't need to do when I'm at the studio where the OSx is old.

[1m1]

Originally Posted by sebaba001

@1m1
To Zoom in and out I mostly press R and T, feels like the fastest method for me. I am currently doing what you suggest, but it's slower in many cases, it's adding an extra unnecessary step to a critical part of my workflow. I am using my mouse wheel a lot more also, which I usually don't need to do when I'm at the studio where the OSx is old.

If you hold the OPTION key while you scroll the mouse wheel, does that zoom in and out for you?

[laki]

Just a shot in the dark... Can you try disabling Inertia for the mouse.

System Prefs->Accessibility->Mouse and Trackpad->Mouse Options (Select Without Inertia)

This fixed it for me, however I am on Sierra and Using the Magic Mouse.

Good Luck!