New toys... simple, that's probably the biggest reason why I love the computer field, and especially Motion Graphics. Today, I've been reading about all the new goodies found in After Effects CS5 as well as the rest of the suite.
Besides the entire platform going to 64-bit ONLY, and significantly increasing multiprocessing speeds, there are some nifty plugins and new render engines that I look forward to playing with.
The one thing that is biggest on my list of new features is hardware assist rendering. This enables big projects in Premiere Pro CS5 to playback real-time without having to render!! I've seen it in action and it's amazing to say the least. That alone pretty much makes the upgrade worthwhile! The problem is that the new render engine only supports CUDA, which is an NVidia GPL only found on their GeForce and Quadro line. This sucks because I just recently made the switch to ATI in hopes that their OpenCL would be supported considering CUDA wasn't supported in the last 3 versions of Adobe CS, boy was I wrong, and it's going to cost me. Aparently a lot of other people fell into this trap as well.
Notable Features:
64-bit: For obvious reasons, being able to address ALL of available memory is a huge plus, and with most of the After Effects core being rewritten for 64-bit, it looks to significantly reduce crashing as well as increase speed and productivity, joy!
Roto Brush: A cool tool to dynamically define foreground (rotoscope brush) and background (alpha channel). While not perfect, it will significantly assist in the creation of rotoscope mattes!
Digieffects FreeForm: Once a 3rd party commercial plugin, now a bundled tool within AE, able to arbitrarily warp layers within 3D space and use other layers as extrusion mattes. Finally able to create some 3D text, among other things, that look MORE like 3D instead of having to create several layers that only LOOK 3D from the front.
Adobe Repoussé: This has definately cropped my eye. An interesting tool in Photoshop for extruding and inflating selections, and then importing directly into AE while also using the Photoshop Live engine so that we can interact with the 3D layer in AE just like Photoshop, pretty cool. I still havn't delved into the 3D support that Photoshop has to offer, it seems pretty limited to me, but this might just give me the motivation to do so.
Color Finesse 3: Another valued 3rd party commercial plugin now bundled with After Effects. Allows greater control over color, saturation, vibrance control, and ability to export Color Look Up Tables. I luffles color control.
Integrated RED R3D support: While I have vivid, heavenly day-dreams of having $25k to buy a RED camera, this is cool to know.
Vibrance: A new effect to better increase saturation in footage. Increasing saturation gave much more color but also removed details, it was kind of a love-hate relationship, look forward to this one.
Black & White: Another effect from Photoshop to better control colors (Not just black and white), offers control over individual colors in highlights, middtones, shadow and much more.
Two new blending modes Subtract and Divide: I always had issues trying to apply alpha mattes, never could get it right on the first go, subtract should help a lot with that, as well as other cool effects too. Divide takes a colored layer and when applied to another layer, creates a middle-ground between that picture/video and the solid color. This provides much more accurate color-blending.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment