looks more like a dot release?

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Believe me, this is one of the most amazing AE upgrades ever. Probably only AE5 and AE6 were bigger than this.

When you try Puppet you’ll be an instant believer. It’s a really, really groundbreaking approach for animating images. It gives you IK-like animation, without having to create bone structures. It’s very easy to use, yet it provides very deep controls for everything.

Shape layers are not a “feature”: they’re a massive arsenal of motion graphics features. It’s not just the AI vector engine, but rather the AI concepts adapted to motion graphics and animation needs. These are sort of whole comps with a very sophisticated hierarchy. What text animators were for text, these will be for shapes.There’s even a mini-replicator inside!

“Hopefully this new update will straighten some of it out.”

Straighten what? AE 7 is pre-Intel. It’s not their fault. You should have known it would run in emulation.
AE CS3 will absolutely fly on your Mac Pro. But you will need a lot of RAM if you want to really take advantage of simultaneous processing. For some projects, you can expect a linear improvement in rendering speed. Enough said.

There are gigantic enhancement across the board. Just to name one: enormously improved, adaptive MB. Instead of using just 16 MB samples, with that very noticeable stepping, AE will now dynamically pick the amount of samples needed to create super smooth MB. How about that?

The ability to bring a Vanishing Point scene from PS as an AE comp, with the perspsective planes converted to AE 3D layers and assemled as a “model” is another groundbreaking feature. Expect to see a lot of this, everywhere.

Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com

[Jamesc]

So… you need to buy a new Mac but have to buy a second hand old one just to run AE?

The rest of the Adobe software wasn’t written for Intel either – and that’s pretty slow on Intel Macs too…

So… if you are an Adobe user – and want to buy a new Mac… you can’t?

[Jeremy Smith]

Without starting any kind of argument….I have read the manual thank you and I guess I should have stated that I’m actually on a Power Mac G5, not an Intel box. I don’t know if all the bold and extra question marks were meant for me but you might try being a little more subtle……

Anyways….Compared to my personal XP system that’s quite a bit older I’m extremely disappointed at AE 7’s performance on what should be a more than capable MAc. Rendering power is just fine…but actual updates to my comp windows, scrubbing through a timeline with just text lags etc. I’m more frustrated and venting because I just finished a project where not only was it painfully slow but Zax crashed so much I had to redesign the entire project and start anew.

[Ron Lindeboom]

Are you serious, James???

Somehow Adobe is now responsible for people not listening and ignoring what Adobe clearly said would happen if they chose to run in emulation?

Wow, no wonder lawyers are so busy today getting settlements for people like the burglar who sued the homeowner that shot him during the burglary.

(Insert Twilight Zone theme music here)

Ron Lindeboom

[Jamesc]

No no Roy – you got me all wrong 🙂

I don’t think it’s Adobe’s fault, nor is it Apple’s fault – nor the end user.

It’s just a bad situation in which you have to work the best you can.

Nobody should be criticised over having to use any of the above combinations because nobody has chosen explicitly to use AE7 on an Intel.

Sadly AE7 is pretty rubbish even on a G5…

If you exclusively use AE then a PC is the only way to go – or at least it has been for the last few years.

[Aindreas Gallagher]

hi ron et al,

welll, i did suspect i was on a rant.. the shape layer feature is beginning to intrigue quite a bit,
the improved ability to address processors and ram had also slipped past me.
the motion blur enhancement is a happy note. Im still a bit leery of puppeter,
which is unfair having not seen it.

As to integration and workflow, i cant argue that, but it goes to the issue of customer choice:
imho opinion premire simply is not at all a match for FCP and im not inclined to drop my skillset
and a superior product for integration carrots. I think it depend on how you look at it.

As a professional im going to try and tool up on what i see as the best and most effective software
(or what was in front of me starting out.. ala 3ds max)

Adobe is proffering the arguement that a walled garden of software,
that inevitably is of varying quality, outweighs that logic. I disagree.

Couldn’t data interoperability also be handled by open standard file formats and OS level
tools? (apples purchase and future OS assimilation of proximity artbox springs to mind..)

anyhoo me two euro cent..

cheers

A

[Ron Lindeboom]

At the end of the day, people will always argue their favorite tool and diss the other guy’s tool. Me, I don’t think that FCP has been much ahead of Premiere Pro for a while now. Sure, there are areas where FCP has and is ahead but there are also areas where Premiere Pro has the advantage — such as FCP’s inability to handle multiple formats on the same timeline. Premiere Pro can do that, as well as handle HDV lightyears ahead of FCP’s (in)abilities to do the same. 4K is also native to Premiere Pro and I could go on and on but I won’t…

I have said it before and will say it again: For one, I could do without a Mac before I could do without Adobe.

That is not a put-down on Macs, as I use them everyday and am writing on one as we speak. But my point is that what a tool enables one to do is well beyond what OS it runs on, etc. In that regard, I don’t see Apple as having the edge on Adobe, I see that as totally falling to Adobe’s edge.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom

[Mike Procunier]

It’s cool that everyone’s so excited about CS3, but it looks like we still have a while to wait. From yesterday’s announcement from Adobe I was under the impression that AE CS3 was coming out in April. After going to Adobe’s store to pre-order I saw that it’s not going to be released until Summer… possibly not until the end of August judging by the dates on their free upgrade promotion. Photoshop CS3 and the Design package are coming out in April. Humbug!!!

[Aindreas Gallagher]

mmm,
my thinking here does kind of amount to; mutter, mutter, rhubarb, rhubarb..

on a childish level i’m mebee just irked to see that after effects is not now
quite as much an individual software effort, but part of a broader initiative.
there, i feel better now.. er..

best,

Aindreas

[Andrew Shanks]

I confess when news first came out about the featureset I was a little disappointed (coming from a compositing perspective, I was hoping curious gfx’s feature set would have well and truly been integrated this time round (better rotosplines, variable feathering, tracking of rotoshapes and points, to name a few)). But I have come round and am looking forward to whats on offer (Universal code of Mac and support for Vista are huge things for a start). Remember it is but a limited feature list at this point that they are marketing, so I suspect more goodies in store that aren’t being hyped.

AE7 saw the interface overhauled and a number of features that benefitted compositing, at the time the motion graphics folks weren’t buzzing so much. This time round its probably only fair there are more mograph enhancements. I can see why Adobe is doing the workflow thing (they’ve been moving that way for years and in a way are chasing Apple in that regard), …but likewise I agree that it’s only can be concidered a feature if you are using 100% macromedia/adobe CS3 products for your workflow, …all my clients cut on Avid or FCP, …so although I do a lot of work in photoshop (and am drooling over the new enhanced version of PSCS3) the integration is not going to benefit me from the import/export side of things (and i feel i am not alone here, being that those two edit platforms still handle the lions share of editing for film and TV).

I am looking forward to the new release, but I am starting to wonder of Adobe is starting to pigeon-hole after effects firmly into the mograph world, leaving compositing aside (Shake may be EOL but i tend to be using it more and more for my complex comps, it just has so many basics that AE lacks when I need to treat a problem comp, …I’d love if AE beefed up its flowchart and allowed us to edit using nodes, …its under the hood, why not write an interface that allows us to tweak in that way if we wish to?). Then again, maybe they are doing a bit of an Apple, and building a new application, purely for compositing (would make sense), nodally based but with after effects timeline (and other AE features, including plugin compatibility), leavering the roto of curious gfx, the painterly interface of Photoshop, and maybe with a GPU accelerated true 3d environment…
…well, a guy can dream can’t he? 😀

But enough of my natterings, I can’t wait for the public beta and this release once again cements AE as the top dog in the mograph world.

Cheers,

andrew

🙂