am I confused?

Well, I was disappointed. When I saw that early product sheet last week I thought “this can’t be all there is”. But, yes this is all there is. Now every release doesn’t have to be earth shattering and I suppose Adobe can’t charge much less for an update – can they? My disappointment isn’t with AE, it works well for what I do most and it will keep working well for what I do most (with or without the update). My biggest disappointment is the fact that it isn’t going to work better for what I do and what I’d like to do more of.

You see I’ve always seen the majority of AE users to be generalists, people who need a little motion graphic design, a little visual effects, a little color timing, a little of this a little of that and they need to do it all themselves. I felt that AE was doing a good job at answering a lot of peoples need for a fair price.

This update brings “riches” (well maybe not that strong of a word) to those people who are working in the film industry. Maybe you get a couple of shots or an opening title sequence each year and now AE has HDR, OpenEXR, 32-bit Float so you say “cool”. Well this is great to add to the generalist tool but is helping the majority?

If you want to improve on integration great I’m all for it, but don’t try and sell me a product (claiming a new feature) that now works with other products from the same software company – that is something I expect in the first place. An update to AE, as far as integration goes, would be that it now can share metadata with more third party applications. Now that would be a new feature. Also I don’t need another finder. I have an OS that has a built-in finder. Now some may like it more than others but I surely don’t need to learn yet another interface and hierarchal system – I can find and organize my own files thank you.

The new interface. Well I haven’t tried it yet so I can’t really say but the mere mention of application window makes me think of that other OS.

So what’s left for the generalist. Graphic Path Editor and Timewarp.

The GPE looks nice and I can see it helping in those times when ease in and ease out just isn’t cutting it.

Timewarp, well the name certainly is. Really must come up with better names for these improvements (read bought out or borrowed ideas). This is one thing I personally could really use. I was going to see if Motion uses optical-flow and see if it can give me clean smooth slow-mo but this “new feature” sounds like it will be a welcome “improvement” over time remapping. Yes AE already does time remapping so Timewarp isn’t a new feature it’s an improvement over what it already does.

My grave disappointment is with the direction of the company’s over all attitude of continuing to follow a closing ranks movement. I’m a generalist. I need my swiss army knife to work with my boy scout cook set and my first aid fire starting poncho kit. Don’t try and sell me one product buy saying it works great with one of your other products. Tell me it works great for what I will use it for and that it works with all other products.

Will I buy it … maybe, the timewarp might be worth it. I could just by Silhouette Roto and wait for the next update then I could end up with two roto applications. My problem is I’ve lost faith.

TonyTony