[Walter Soyka]

Of course, Andrew! And I don’t mean to go to Pollyanna myself. Adobe deserves a good bashing every now and again.

This thread about threads just seemed a good jumping-off point to talk about some of the technical challenges of modernizing a 25-year old application — there have been a lot of other conversations here that dramatically oversimplified the work necessary.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Walter Soyka]

After Effects turned 25 this year. That’s a long legacy! Doing something as “simple” as separating the UI from the renderer meant re-writing core functionality — like the entire preview system — that has been in place for a long time.

Multithreading lets you do more than one task in parallel — but everything Ae used to do with respect to project state was done serially. First you update state in the UI, then you render, then you return control. Separating the UI and the renderer introduces the need for flawlessly reliable, high-performance synchronization of project state between the UI and the renderer. With the complicated nature of Ae itself, plus multiple platforms to target, rapid framework churn on the macOS side, and a whole galaxy of third-party plug-ins to support, you can imagine there are any number of things that could go wrong.

Very few people appreciate the difficulty of re-engineering After Effects without breaking compatibility or blowing up the UX — but Adobe is (slowly) getting it done.

Some of the loudest voices on this forum have spent the last few years slamming the developers, with little understanding of what the development team is actually doing. It’s easy for a user to minimize the challenge of modernizing a legacy application like Ae and laying the groundwork for its next 25 years, but this is a little bit like popping the hood and changing out the engine while someone’s driving the car on the highway.

Do I want to see higher performance and better resource utilization from After Effects? Absolutely! But seeing some of the work that Adobe is releasing — extending RAM caches to the global performance cache, building effects that run footage analysis in the background, separating the UI from the renderer, building a vendor-neutral GPU pipeline, turning the world upside-down with Master Properties, getting the CINEMA 4D renderer into Ae, adding “little” polish features that we can use every day — that keeps me excited for the future!

Walter Soyka
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Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Walter Soyka]

While the multithreading conversation is interesting and valuable in its own right, I think it presents an easy trap to fall into: talking about theoretical architecture instead of real-world performance.

Puget Systems has published a lot of good research on After Effects performance. Maybe start here:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Adobe-After-Effects-CC-144/Hardware-Recommendations

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Walter Soyka]

[Andrew Somers] “Michael said …each version of AE adds more and more GPU-accelerated effects
Are those CUDA specific? Because I thought the trend was to go to Open CL, instead of being tied to nVidia.”

Ae allows you to choose Metal, OpenCL or software-only (CPU) on Mac, or CUDA, OpenCL or software-only (CPU) on PC.

This is a project-level setting.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Walter Soyka]

[George Henderson] “Oh wow, that’s it! I had no idea ‘Essential Graphics’ existed. Just watched several videos and played around a bit, it certainly does the job and so much more. Thanks for exposing me to such handy feature.”

I think Master Properties is the biggest improvement to Ae since CS5 (when Ae went 64-bit).

It’s a sneaky-powerful feature that can completely change the way we approach our work.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Walter Soyka]

[john smith] “I downloaded a trial of Sapphire’s Distort to check it out but I can’t seem to extend the edges. When I play with the settings it distorts the entire image.”

Yes, S_Distort will distort everything. You’d have to comp it together with a non-distorted layer for edge extension.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Walter Soyka]

[Daniel Warren] “Is there a way to add effects or parameters that aren’t the presets in the ‘Add’ menu in a text animator?”

Unfortunately not. Text animators work on specific, intrinsic properties only.

Can you share an example of what you’re trying to achieve? There might be other ways to get the same effect.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Walter Soyka]

[Filip Stillerska] “Well, I’ll just keep ignoring this message since it doesn’t create any issues and especially since it removes its own old cache files to make room for new ones. If it didn’t automatically remove old caches then it would be a different story for me (then I would go and manually empty it). Disk cache is important.”

Sorry, I think I was unclear.

Ae maintains separate cache folders, per version of After Effects. Any version of Ae will prune its own cache, but it will NOT automatically prune old cache files from other versions of Ae. (Starting with 15.1, though, explicitly running the clear cache command should remove caches from older versions.)

Take a look inside your cache folder. If you have caches from previous versions of Ae that you are not actively using, you can manually remove those caches — they’re taking up room that your current cache can’t use.

If those old caches and your conformed media cache is taking up more than 100 GB, then you won’t have 400 GB available for the new cache and will get that notification.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Walter Soyka]

[john smith] “Again if we can find it’s counterpart in AE that would be awesome!”

Before Flame got a similar effect several years back (called Pixel Spread). Prior to that, Flame artists had been extending edges outward by using the third party tool Sapphire Distort, with the Fine box checked.

Sapphire is also available for Ae, so you can use the same trick.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Walter Soyka]

1. In your current setup, which DOES have each file as a separate layer, you’d need to modify the expression that Cassius suggested to something like this:

myScale = linear(index,1,99,100,80);
[myScale, myScale];

But if you’re really going to hold each frame/layer for several frames, this expression will give you a steppy effect you may not want, so…

2. You should probably use an image sequence as Andrew describes. Image sequences allow you to treat a set of individual frames like this as if they were a movie. When you import one of the image files, make sure the sequence option is checked.

More on image sequences here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/preparing-importing-still-images.html#import_a_single_still_image_or_a_still_image_sequence

And since you’re new to Ae, here’s a good place to start:
https://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2010/01/getting-started-with-after-eff.html

I think the Andrew Devis After Effects Basics series and the Video Copilot Basic Training and are particularly good starts.

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