Adobe Creative Suite 4 Announced! After Effects New Features : Adobe After Effects

> Customers can continue to use Ultra CS3 by ...

Many thanks, but I know how to use Ultra. I've been using it long before the
Adobe acquisition of Serious Magic. And by the way, Ultra CS3 was nothing
really but a repackaged Ultra 2 with a new label, and Ultra 2 was released
many moons ago. It was somewhat of a let down when CS3 shipped to see
nothing new had been added except Vista support, but here we are, yet
another CS release is out, and still nothing new. Bummer. I thought sure
this round of CS4 would include something to show for Ultra. Sorry to go
on, but it's just a huge disappointment.

Best,
Christopher

I'm pleased with the CS4 release. I work heavily on Premiere Pro and had the reverse sentiment when CS3 was released. I saw many new features and improvements in After Effects, with only a few little tweaks here and there in Premiere Pro. Mainly PPro CS3 was focused on returning to Mac compatibility, so not much more room in development for new features and enhancements.

This time around, it seems After Effects is receiving the tweak treatment, but all the tweaks are - amazingly - pretty much all the stuff that users in the forums have been begging for. Yes, some of the stuff isn't worth a full release cycle (should be more like point releases on CS3) but a lot of things are going to be very handy (search functions, flowcharts).

That being said, I am blown away with how Dynamic Link finally goes all the way around for After Effects, Premiere Pro, Encore and Soundbooth (making Soundbooth now actually usable, especially with the multi-tracking and ASND document format). Being able to select a group of clips on the timeline in Premiere Pro, convert them to an After Effects comp with a single right-click selection and then do color grading or keying or whatever in AE while all being instantly updated back in the edit...awesome. And importing sequences from PPro into Encore with no rendering is going to save time and quality...and a little bit of storage space as well.

Plus (should I go on?), the speech-to-text feature in Premiere Pro will help streamline the production of closed captioning and subtitles, very important for government work. Whether it ends up being 95% accurate or 50% accurate is yet to be seen, but in either case it's much quicker and cheaper than the current options. That may be the feature that helps the upgrade pay for itself for those of us doing or pursuing that kind of work.

And Ultra...while it is a shame it (currently) appears to have been left out of the release, I would think it more appropriate to be tied to Premiere Pro rather than After Effects. Keylight is very thorough and very deep for that kind of keying work, and it's already in After Effects. Premiere Pro, on the other hand, lacks anything resembling a quick 'n dirty keyer that Ultra is so handy for. When I'm doing those impossible keys from DV footage, Ultra saves the day. When compared against Keylight with quality footage, however, there's no comparison...Keylight owns the turf. So if it were to be "embedded" in a current product, I would expect (and rather prefer) to see it in Premiere Pro. Other than that, it would be perfectly sufficient to leave it as a standalone application and just allow Dynamic Link to handle the import of Ultra project files to prevent rendering.

So, maybe I didn't make my POV clear....I really am pleased with the CS4 improvements for the production suite. Glad to see one shared interface on everything - including OnLocation. Glad to see Dynamic Link being as awesome as it always needed to be. Glad to see a complete Blu Ray menu creation solution in Encore.

Christian Jolly wrote:
> I'm pleased with the CS4 release. I work heavily on Premiere Pro and
> had the reverse sentiment when CS3 was released. I saw many new
> features and improvements in After Effects, with only a few little
> tweaks here and there in Premiere Pro. Mainly PPro CS3 was focused on
> returning to Mac compatibility, so not much more room in development
> for new features and enhancements.

And the Mac folks gave Premiere something less than a resounding huzzah.
AE however I have had hardly a lick of trouble on the MacPro.


> This time around, it seems After Effects is receiving the tweak
> treatment, but all the tweaks are - amazingly - pretty much all the
> stuff that users in the forums have been begging for. Yes, some of
> the stuff isn't worth a full release cycle (should be more like point
> releases on CS3) but a lot of things are going to be very handy
> (search functions, flowcharts).
>
> That being said, I am blown away with how Dynamic Link finally goes
> all the way around for After Effects, Premiere Pro, Encore and
> Soundbooth (making Soundbooth now actually usable, especially with
> the multi-tracking and ASND document format). Being able to select a
> group of clips on the timeline in Premiere Pro, convert them to an
> After Effects comp with a single right-click selection and then do
> color grading or keying or whatever in AE while all being instantly
> updated back in the edit...awesome. And importing sequences from PPro
> into Encore with no rendering is going to save time and quality...and
> a little bit of storage space as well.

Yes! Finally, the dynamic link goes both ways! This function alone is
worth it for me. Just click em and link em and suddenly go from slice
and dice and basic effects to the wide wide possibilities of AE.


> Plus (should I go on?), the speech-to-text feature in Premiere Pro
> will help streamline the production of closed captioning and
> subtitles, very important for government work. Whether it ends up
> being 95% accurate or 50% accurate is yet to be seen, but in either
> case it's much quicker and cheaper than the current options. That may
> be the feature that helps the upgrade pay for itself for those of us
> doing or pursuing that kind of work.
>
> And Ultra...while it is a shame it (currently) appears to have been
> left out of the release, I would think it more appropriate to be tied
> to Premiere Pro rather than After Effects. Keylight is very thorough
> and very deep for that kind of keying work, and it's already in After
> Effects. Premiere Pro, on the other hand, lacks anything resembling a
> quick 'n dirty keyer that Ultra is so handy for. When I'm doing those
> impossible keys from DV footage, Ultra saves the day. When compared
> against Keylight with quality footage, however, there's no
> comparison...Keylight owns the turf. So if it were to be "embedded"
> in a current product, I would expect (and rather prefer) to see it in
> Premiere Pro. Other than that, it would be perfectly sufficient to
> leave it as a standalone application and just allow Dynamic Link to
> handle the import of Ultra project files to prevent rendering.
>
> So, maybe I didn't make my POV clear....I really am pleased with the
> CS4 improvements for the production suite. Glad to see one shared
> interface on everything - including OnLocation. Glad to see Dynamic
> Link being as awesome as it always needed to be. Glad to see a
> complete Blu Ray menu creation solution in Encore.
>
> * **EDIT*** The other things I really REALLY liked seeing is that
> Premiere Pro has been optimized for Vista 64 bit (don't know about
> Mac, Vista was the only one I saw specifically listed regarding 64
> bit operation). This will be very handy. Also, batch rendering shared
> between PPro, AE and Flash...cool cool cool.

So what new features didn't make the main marketing bullets? You know, little odds 'n ends 'n enhancements that help workflow, but aren't blockbuster enough to mention on the main page.

So what new features didn't make the main marketing bullets? You know,
little odds 'n ends 'n enhancements that help workflow, but aren't blockbuster
enough to mention on the main page.




The "User interface changes from After Effects CS3 to After Effects CS4" <http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WSF288ABA0-1445-4297-ABAC-EBBCAE82E0FB.html> section of Help gives insight into that.

I'm working on a blog post that lists things in a different way and answers this question.

Stay tuned.

I was hoping for more mask control...variable feathering and the ability to see the keyframes for individual points along the mask.

KMS

> And Ultra...while it is a shame it (currently) appears to have been left
> out of the release, I would think it more appropriate to be tied to
> Premiere Pro rather than After Effects. Keylight is very thorough and very
> deep for that kind of keying work, and it's already in After Effects.
> Premiere Pro, on the other hand, lacks anything resembling a quick 'n
> dirty keyer that Ultra is so handy for.

If the Ultra keying technology makes it into PPro, that's fine, but that's
not Ultra. And if I need keying, I have Ultra, Ultra 2, Ultra CS3, and AE
keylight, so it's not the lack of keying about which I'm very disappointed.
What makes Ultra unique is the tracking sets. What limits Ultra is the
limited set of available libraries. Several years ago I began asking
Serious Magic (and now Adobe) to enhance this product so that users and
third party developers could create new tracking sets. Years have gone by.
Nothing. Bummer.

Best,
Christopher

So far most things sound like minor tweaks. Not worth the $900 to upgrade as far as I can tell.

Any improvements to how expressions are handled? Specifically an Expressions palette or coding window?

If an action (like deleting a layer an expression is looking at) breaks an expressions and it turns off, will undo turn the expression back on (currently undo doesn't reactivate expressions)?

Any nodal expression linking (like Cinema 4D)? Or pickwhipping expressions to code snippet nodes?

Any better memory handling on extremely large layers? I'd rather have AE spool to the hard drive for a minute than completely crap out of the render with a memory buffer error.