After Effects and METAL – revised messaging.

[Aindreas Gallagher]

adobe are up to their eyeballs re-architecting the guts of AE – CC2015 AE has multi-processing formally taken offline for the duration. That should give an indication of how far into the entrails they are.

I’m inclined to leave them at it – but some of the speed increases on AE effects demoed under metal were pretty mouthwatering.
But the fact that Todd Kopivra doesn’t want to nail his flag to the mast on metal isn’t maybe utterly surprising. They’ve probably got a couple of considerations as a cross platform vendor. In a way – if they went hell for leather with metal it would almost work out as a reverse of the windows cuda situation they’ve just half backed out of.

If there was a lot less joy for windows CC customers in a heavily metal focused scenario I doubt Walter or Chris Petit (who just forked over for CC under duress) would be exactly over-joyed?

https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Oliver Peters]

First off, AE doesn’t exclusively use GPU power, so Metal may or may not be that big of a factor. Second, AE needs to maintain cross-platform parity. Third, Metal isn’t necessarily that highly regarded in the developer community. For example:

https://streamcomputing.eu/blog/2015-06-08/apple-metal-versus-vulkan-opencl-2-1/

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Walter Soyka]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “If there was a lot less joy for windows CC customers in a heavily metal focused scenario I doubt Walter or Chris Petit (who just forked over for CC under duress) would be exactly over-joyed?”

*shrug* I’d just use the right tool for the job. We have a few nMPs, too. I now actually prefer PCs myself, but we’re trying to stay cross-platform whenever possible, just in case, and we use a few products that are only available on one platform or the other.

Apple would have you think Metal is unique, but in fact Apple is one of an industry full of players making the same move: dropping abstraction layers from the GPU pipeline (requiring programmers to know more about the guts of the GPU, pushing programmers “closer to the metal”), offering a unified model for graphics and compute shaders (letting programmers use the same hardware and data structures for both drawing and calculating), and increasing pure graphics performance by reducing the GPU’s dependence on the CPU for managing state for draw calls (making programmers work harder to manage the flow of their render pipeline in order to reduce the amount of time the GPU is blocked from drawing, waiting on the CPU).

AMD’s Mantle was first. Microsoft’s DirectX 12, Khronos Group’s Vulkan (a new standard from the consortium who administer OpenGL and OpenCL, based on Mantle), and Apple’s Metal are all following.

Beyond that, not all visual tasks are suitable for GPU acceleration; thinking “it’ll be lots faster if you run just it on the GPU” is not universally true. There’s a lot more complexity here than what demos well, and an OpenGL fragment shader pipeline in Ae (like Flame’s) could probably deliver most of that same acceleration for the simple effects in David’s demo.

tldr; Metal is cool, but it is not the only game in town for next-gen GPU acceleration. Apple’s a fast-follower, and if you only watch WWDC, you’ll get a very distorted view of the state of the art. Ae needs to get faster, and Metal might help make that happen, but there are other ways worth considering, too.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Andrew Kimery]

[Oliver Peters] “First off, AE doesn’t exclusively use GPU power, so Metal may or may not be that big of a factor.”

IIRC AE barely uses the GPU at all (last I heard the only GPU accelerated effect is the ray tracer, but I’m no AE expert). Of course I have no idea how much AE will take advantage of GPUs once the team is done redoing the guts of the app. With that being said, AE is cross platform and Metal only officially works on Macs made since 2012 so I have to wonder about the cost/benefit of Adobe spending a whole lot of time on such a specific market segment.

To me it seems that speeds gain benefiting both Mac and PC users on both newer and older hardware would be the natural place for Adobe to start focusing on improvements.

[Aindreas Gallagher]

[Oliver Peters] “Second, AE needs to maintain cross-platform parity. “

I know – but didn’t I say that?

https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Dennis Radeke]

[Walter Soyka] ”
tldr; Metal is cool, but it is not the only game in town for next-gen GPU acceleration. Apple’s a fast-follower, and if you only watch WWDC, you’ll get a very distorted view of the state of the art. Ae needs to get faster, and Metal might help make that happen, but there are other ways worth considering, too.”

This ^^^

Other than quoting Walter, I will stay out of this one.

[Bret Williams]

I doubt that many people willing to rent their software have computers much older than 2012. I thought that metal was just an apple name for a tech that also exists on PC platform, no?

[David Mcgavran]

Adobe is firmly committed to performance because it accelerates creativity – Adobe is also firmly committed to the Mac platform. We share as much as we can about the directions we’re exploring and will continue to try and set realistic expectations about when specific advancements will come to market. When we demonstrated what was possible, we made a clear statement – which I repeat here: “Adobe is committed to bringing Metal to all of its Mac OS Creative Cloud applications, such as Illustrator and After Effects I showed you today, as well as Photoshop and Premiere Pro. We are very excited to see what Metal can do for our Creative Cloud users.”

David McGavran
Director of Engineering
Adobe Professional Audio and Video

———————————————————————————————————
David McGavran, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Director of Engineering, Adobe Professional Audio and Video
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[Andrew Kimery]

[Bret Williams] “I doubt that many people willing to rent their software have computers much older than 2012.

Why? Year over year computer speed advancements aren’t nearly what they used to be and if you have a computer that can be upgraded (such as PC or an old MP) you can greatly extend the life by just swapping out slower parts for faster ones. My news computer is a 2011 MBP and many of the places I work at still run the old MPs (though the nMPs are starting to pop up).

I thought that metal was just an apple name for a tech that also exists on PC platform, no?”

Apple is the name of their version of this type of API. On the Windows side you have DirectX12 (aka DX12) and there is a cross platform one in the works called Vulcan which may or may not gain traction because obviously MS and Apple want devs to use their proprietary solutions. Apple has never had very good GPU support compared to Windows (in terms of cards supported, driver support, and API support) so I would assume Metal will look even more enticing to Mac devs. It’s almost like Apple wants to hamstring other options so their solution looks so much better. 😉

[James Culbertson]

I’ve been using AE for 20 years and at this point I rarely pay attention to speed enhancements. Everything renders so fast I don’t really care. I do have a MacCylinder though.