Premiere & After Effects CS6 - New features

[Brad]

So Adobe just released a ton of new info on the CS6 upgrade. Premiere is getting a bunch of great performance enhancements and an updated UI. Not 100% sure how much I love the new UI, but it does seem like it'll be very customizable so it probably isn't a big deal. I also like that they're including AE's fantastic Warp Stabilizer into it. Was gonna be a pretty huge pain to stabilize your footage in AE just to bring it back into Premiere. Also, Adjustment Layers in Premiere! Hot damn! All in all it looks like a pretty cool upgrade.

After Effects is getting a pretty huge upgrade this time around. The most notable one is that they're finally giving us a true 3D ray-tracing render engine, completely built-in, and very GPU driven. We'll finally have a 1st-party way to do 3D text and shapes, along with being able to bend 2D layers in 3D space (something I've been wanting for many years). Now, my instincts tell me that in it's first iteration, the 3D is probably not going to be stellar, and there'll be things I just NEED Cinema4D for, but for simple 3D text and shapes, which comes up a LOT, I'm sure it'll be quite nice to have.

We're also getting a built-in 3D Camera tracker! I'm understandably concerned about the quality of the solver here but if it works well, that's a very valuable upgrade. No word on actual 3D object tracking yet though. Ummm lets see what else.. Variable mask feathering! Fantastic! Reeeeaaally needed when you're doing a lot of intricate rotoscoping. It's something the bigger packages like Nuke and Flame have had for a while and it's helped set them apart. Now we've got it! Yay!

As cool and on-the-surface as these new features are, I think the under-the-hood stuff is probably going to mean the most to me in my everyday workflow though. The new Global Performance Cache looks like it'll really speed up my workflow and just make life easier. They're also working hard on off-loading a lot of the processing to the GPU, which should also make things nice and zippy.

All in all, lots of exciting stuff. Not even getting into the crazy wizardry that Photoshop is giving us now. Here's some handy links if you wanna dive into this stuff more.

General CS6 Production Premium announcement: http://success.adobe.com/en/na/programs ... 8_nab.html
Little videos about all the new AE features: http://www.video2brain.com/en/products-313.htm

[Cannonaire]

Any info on when it will be released? I was planning on dropping the money on CS5.5 within the next few weeks, but now I want to wait for this one.

[Brad]

There's no official date as of right now, but most people are predicting May 6th. Though it doesn't really matter since they have a policy in place that says if you buy CS5.5 right now, you'll get the CS6 upgrade for free as soon as it comes out (though I'd double check that independently before you pull the trigger)

[BasharOfTheAges]

They're also working hard on off-loading a lot of the processing to the GPU, which should also make things nice and zippy.

Well, that sounds good. I saw some previous testing that showed the performance gains vs the price you paid for a video card in CS4 and CS5 and the line was almost horizontal even though they were touting it as a feature. GPU assist shouldn't be limited to about a 10% performance gain - it might as well not be there in that case.

[Mister Hatt]

GPU assistance usage kinda depends on the GPU in question, on a Plex 7000 card it's pretty zippy, not so much on a GTX 680 or anything ATI poop out these days.

3D motracking is pretty hot, I've been using Flame for it and occasionally SideFX (not that I do amvs ever though) and it's pretty nifty given the content I have, but Mocha's tracker is almost as good for 90% of things. I do like the UI though, at least what I tried out in the CS6 beta for other products, but I doubt I'll be switching to AE from Flame/Lustre any time soon.

[Brad]

They're also working hard on off-loading a lot of the processing to the GPU, which should also make things nice and zippy.

Well, that sounds good. I saw some previous testing that showed the performance gains vs the price you paid for a video card in CS4 and CS5 and the line was almost horizontal even though they were touting it as a feature. GPU assist shouldn't be limited to about a 10% performance gain - it might as well not be there in that case.

Based on the demo video I saw talking about the GPU advancements, it SEEMS like they've actually taken it way further than ever before. Like, in previous versions the OpenGL enhancements were never really worthwhile. With CS6 it's supposed to be a much bigger part of the overall architecture. But, we'll have to wait and see how it shakes out in real world usage.

[DJ_Izumi]

Dangit Adobe, give us Radeon users some love! ;_;

Also, curious to see how the rolling shutter fix works, and if it's better than The Foundry's $500 solution.

[Pwolf]

there's a video on adobe's website that demonstrates it.

[DJ_Izumi]

there's a video on adobe's website that demonstrates it.

Yeah but so did the Foundry and it looked great... And it WORKED great on CERTIAN scenarios but not every scenario.

[Mister Hatt]

Off topic hey Izumi, that's a name I haven't seen in like 8 years, what's up?

On topic do people still use Foundry products? Node based workflow is fine and all but Nuke and friends were always kinda hacky...