2005 AE7 hopes fading…

[Guy]

I think it would be fitting if it was released on Christmas morning.

(that is Christmas 2005, Adobe)

kidding aside, I’d be pretty pissed if it wasn’t a BIG release after all the waiting.

[Mecha]

After watching the little sneak peek at AE7 on the Macromedia site (or seminar or something) I am not holding out too much hope for any “killer” features.

It would appear to be an interface overhaul, flash integration and more ready made / prefab animations. I heard rumours of a new rotoscoping featue too.

I think the BIG thing will be the intergration with Flash.

Then again….what do I know!

[Bill Clotz]

I am thinking we will probably hear something either this month or in January. It’s just not like Adobe to let their products be shown off too far in advance, and a new version is has been due for some time now.
I am REALLY hoping better rotoscoping tools are available, although nothing was mentioned on the video that was released. I will be quite disappointed if its not there.

[Tony Kloiber]

A full-fledged Roto with access to each node and per-node feather. XML import/export (sorry duck). Those two things and an interface-lift would be what I’m wishing for.

Ah Christmas Wishes

TonyTony

[Jeremy Webb]

i would go for a more solid 3d environment. mainly, being able to work with 3d shapes. and maybe some sort of real time previewing

[Chris Smith]

I think AE needs to at minimum catch up with combustion and commotion on the very basics of a video composite program:

-A tracker that is useful, smooth, and has math functions for smooth, merge, scale the keys, etc.
-Roto tools you can use. Feathering on parts of a mask, tracking points, direct matchmove of masks (as opposed to matchmove a layer with a mask), And a better way of grabbing and manipulating the masks themselves. I spend more time screwing up my mask trying to grab it right then using the thing.
-A REAL COLOR CORRECTOR. AE still uses Photoshop tools. AE needs a DaVinci style color corrector (like Combustion).

And a couple small changes I think one of their programmers could do in a weekend:

– Stroke. One of the things I see people use 3D stroke for is not even the 3D! But the tapering. AE Stroke already has the start / end / offset, Why not add a tapering option? Seems easy.
– The number generator. I see so many posts about how to get the number generator to go higher or display in some reasonable standard that it still won’t show.
–

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Andrew Shanks]

I don’t agree with some of your points Chris, the 2D tracker is fine (I use both Commotion and Combustion I hasten to mention, and i do a lot of 2D and matchmoving), …as for manipulation of keyframes, thats what expressions excell at (the most useful expression I use is for averaging a forward track with a reverse track to get a silky smooth average). I used to love commotion, and its tracker has always been one of the best, …but using it now, well, its far too slow, …I have 3D matchmoving software that can complete a whole scene with hundreds of track points in the time it takes to do one (so that combined with only 8 bit support means commotion now doesn’t get a look in, ….although i still dream of superclone being re-incarnated in AE one day, …and yes, tracking to mask points would be good too).

As for colour correction, we do have colour finesse (which is very powerful), …but yes, I have to confess that even though its one of the better correctors around, its soooo painful to use it in After Effects, …would be nice to either have better integration of it (i.e. it works in the after effects interface direct) or for AE to have its own version.

As for AE7, …yeah, I’m upset its not out, …but I actually figure the delay might be due to them integrating things for recent acqusitions (including macromedia, and curious GFX). Curious GFX is a good (if a little querky in its GUI) rotoscoping program, that if integrated properly, should give us all the rotoscoping goodies we’e been craving.

Cheers,

andrew

[Chris Smith]

I confess that I have never used expressions in AE. Which is strange because in Maya and Shake I lean heavily on them. Something about the javascript turns me off. However one could argue that although that is a solution, it is not an elegant one for the casual user. Commotion still has it best in my opinion, a simple math ops window.

As far as speed of Commotion track are you setting it to software or ‘powermac G4’? If you set it to PowermacG4 (also on a G5) it’s blazing fast even with the precision all the way up (how I track). When I do tracks, I give the AE one a quick go. But it never fails to be rough track straight out of the gate. I do the same track in Commotion and it’s often great at the get-go.

Yes I do respect CF. But as I’ve ranted before in other threads a while back, like you said, it’s integration with AE defeats it’s usability in my book. If you have all day to futz with it, fine, but I don’t 🙁

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Chris Smith]

Hey Paul, Yeah it looks fantastic. I guess my requests were for the benefit of AE itself. I actually use Avid|DS to do my roto/track/composite work now (getting tired of the FCP to AE thing), I was just ranting that as a program there were some basics that I felt AE was getting behind on. It was for my love of AE that I had to critisize..sniff (chokes up).

They grow up so fast. 🙂

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Annaël Beauchemin]

[Guy] “kidding aside, I’d be pretty pissed if it wasn’t a BIG release after all the waiting.”

it’s funny, but I’m not pissed at all of the delay. I’m really amazed at how well 6.5 runs in term of stability (10.3 G5 2×2). I can’t remember one time it crashed. It did crash a few times with an old plugin I have, but it’s otherwise flawless and bug free. I realize that working with stable apps is much easier on my nerves.

I just hope this will stay true with AE7.