2005 AE7 hopes fading…

[Matthew Polack]

Maybe Adobe is waiting to launch AE 7 as part of the wider suite of upgrades..ie. Auditon, Encore etc. in the Video Collection…and I guess just one delay in development of a single piece could be enough to hold the whole show up!
Anyway there’s nothing quite like a bit of speculation:)

[Nicholas Toth]

What is so good about ae7? The flash export? New particle generator presets?

It seems that all of the things I’ve (we as a community) have worked on are going to be made easier. But this doesn’t make any sense to me — action scripting in flash is now back to the old style where its just coding — but ae is going in the other direction and making it easier for anyone to use. Is this good or bad? I guess I’m just tired of having people say to me “oh yeah thats easy I can do that…” and more of those comments have arisen since motion and now with AE7 —- you can teach a monkey to animate. (sorry if thats cynical guys — but some people just piss me off when they think creating opens/fill etc. is a walk in the park)

I can’t tell if the new ae7 is a positive or negative thing. Anyone know of any cool new rumored features for it?
Ie: better motion tracker?

Nicholas Toth
Freelance Animator
nicholastoth.com

[Rambobaby]

I agree with Jeremy. Working with 3D objects directly in AE would be awesome and is my first pic. I know I’m just dreaming here, but some sort of motion estimation to interpolate pixel data would be way cool also. Time stretching layers can get pretty lame if you need really slow motion.

[Andrew Shanks]

Hey Chris!
I confess I’m stuck in PC-land these days so don’t have a G4 or G5 to use commotions hardware acelerated tracking on, …hmmm, have been looking at getting my own shake seat on a mac so maybe old commotion will get a dusting off for some tracking duties (great it comes with both pc and mac versions in the box, …certainly used to be the most accurate 2D tracker, and the ability to send keyframes to AE was always great). I worked on a feature film last year with a friend of mine and he was using the roto-import plugin, using commotion for rotosplining then importing those into the final composites he was doing in AE, …worked a treat. Will be interesting to see what the curious gfx licencing will give AE in terms of tracking and roto abilities.
As for expressions, they’re not too horrible, …I too dabble in scripting only when necessary, …but thankfully AE tries to guess what you might be wanting to do based one you using the pickwhip to drag and drop on a parent attribute from another layer (then you can add basic maths to that to get the result you want), …the whole pickwhip thing reminds me of the way parenting of attributes in shake works (although its been a while since I played in shake so I might be mistaken, but i seem to remember it using a similar way of operating). Anything more complex you can usually find a template on one an AE expressions site or from other users on the forum, …I got the tracking averaging template from a user on cow, and now just call it up whenever I’m trying to smooth a track (the track forward then track backward of the same target, works a treat to smooth out the little bits of jitter that the high subpixel sampling introduces in AE).

I hope that AE7 does address the compositing users (high on my list is floating point and revamping the flowchart view into a proper nodal interface, …something that isn’t technically that difficult as nodal is the way every compositor runs under the hood, compositions being like nested trees, …only real addition would be the provision of some basic nodes (such as layer linking varieties, maybe premult, transfer mode node (or could be handled with witin the source layers own node preferences), and a transform node (that takes care of all of AEs normal transform options). All dreams at this point, but I will be annoyed if AE7 is more geared towards motion graphics without improving visual effects workflow/toolset).

we wait and see.

cheers,

andrew

🙂

[David Modijefsky]

Any sign of multi processor support?