Adobe After Effects is improving it’s 3D experience!

Coming Soon to After Effects Beta – New ways to work with 3D

Discover these new 3D tools to help you navigate in 3D space better and faster, including improved camera features and 3D Transform Gizmos. pic.twitter.com/CXpef2DNo7

— Adobe Video & Motion (@AdobeVideo) September 15, 2020

Awesome After Effects is updating it’s 3D tools, and looks like it is a borrowing from C4D which can only be good. The 3D tools have always been way too basic, and this could be a huge improvement.

Does anyone else lament the loss of Red Giant’s Keying suite from the VFX suite?

 

Now it isn’t like I don’t love the Red Giant VFX suite, but I have been a Red Giant user for many years, and I miss all the tools of the Keying Suite. 
Now I am not complaining about Primatte Keyer 6 which is included in the Red Giant VFX Suite. It is very powerful and easy to use, though since Primatte 5 doesn’t really seem to work with 2020 or Beta it had better be good, but I do miss all off the ancillary plugs ins of the Keying suite, and I do know that many of the effects have been incorporated in SUPERCOMP, but I want all the controls of the individual plug-ins again.
I will admit that I am using keyers in a different method than most, as Primatte works great for a standard green screen (which I am using as well), and I find it vastly superior to the build in Keylight. The thing is I am doing puppeteering and using a green glove to puppet a teddy bear, so instead of just the green, I want to expand the green beyond the glove, instead of objects inside the green screen. And yes I can do that with rotoscoping, but that kind of negates using a green glove as I have to animate every frame.
And I have to admit I had an easier job doing that when I had the tools all in separate plug ins. I miss the key correct plugs in. I miss seperate versions of Alpha Cleaner, Light Wrap (which I know is in SUPERCOMP), Matte Feather, Smooth Screen, Spill Killer (I know this is in Primmate 6) and Wire/Rig Remover, which is more what I am trying to do. And yes I still have the old plugins, but they really don’t work in After Effects 2020.
Now I know I am using the plug ins out of their comfort zone, but using the separate plug ins I was much better able to do what I wanted to, and with Primatte 6 only having some of the plug ins integrated I am not as happy with what I can do.
And that is beyond the whole SUPERCOMP not working with Motion Blur thing which really needs to be fixed.

Roto Brush 2 in the After Effects Beta is a vast improvement

So I have been using Roto Brush for years in After Effects. It was a tool that worked with a lot of user input, but it was so incredibly slow. And honestly with footage getting larger I think it had actually gotten slower, but Adobe has finally been working on an upgrade that is available in the current Beta.

Roto Brush 2 stills needs user input and it doesn’t do well with a lot of motion blur, but it is so much faster! It used to take sometimes minutes to calculate a single frame, and now in minutes it can calculate a whole clip.

I am not sure how much better of a roto that it does than the old version, but the speed in which it works means you can make changes and even work frame by frame, and work quickly enough to do a basic roto very quickly.

I am so glad for the public betas and them letting us use unreleased features.

Now I know why Adobe denied my request for years on apps, they have made all apps in the same category the same color, so they are harder to tell apart!

So I opened Adobe’s updates today and low and behold, they have updated a great swatch of apps, but even worse they have updated the icons so that applications in the same category are the same color. Sure it means you can tell this years apps from earlier versions, but now it is easier to confuse different apps for each other as all the video apps are now the same damn color, WTF! And this will get even worse when they release next years versions with the same damn app icon (why can’t they put some versioning in the icon?).

These are the swath of Adobe Apps I keep in my Dock, and without dragging over them with a cursor it is a pain in the ass to tell them apart (and yes I need the different versions as some companies I work with run older versions because of stability issues).

Hell even the beta icons are changing already, though at least they will let me keep breaking up the apps

I guess at least this year for individual apps it will be easier, but what about when the previous 2 versions have the same damn icon, and they are all the same color?

For a company that makes applications for designers they sure have a shitty sense of design!

Adobe denied my feature request to put the year on the application icons without allowing anyone to vote on it

So adobe very quickly denied my feature request to add the year to the product icon, saying since they have removed the year form the product name. Though they have not. They removed the CC for Creative Cloud for the name.

And as they have always done the updates for the year stay at 2020, until the next version will be 2021.

And they should have differentiated icons, WTF!

Why do Adobe Application Icons not include the year of the application so they are easier to tell apart at a glance?

 

So these are the application icons for Premiere Pro and After Effects 2019 and 2020 in my dock. Why do they have the exact same icon? Yes if I hover my cursor over each one it will tell me the whole application name, but why don’t you just put the version number in the icon?

And yes I need to have both versions. I am a professional commercial video editor, and very often I have to match a companies version so that the project files will open in the version that they are using. And then there was the whole Arri files not working in 2020 After Effects, but that is another story.

Now I used to customize the icons on my own, but that is a pain in the ass, and they get replaced every update, so if I am paying over $600 a year for a subscription to Creative Cloud can’t they update the icons for each yearly version? And I don’t mean just change the Icon, like they did for Photoshop with 2020.

That is 2019 on the left and 2020 on the right. And sure it helps, but I still have to think, oh yea the rounded icon is the new one.

So I made a couple of examples of what I used to do and what they could do. Here is a Premiere pro with the 2020 included.

Now this totally works for me, but I have fairly large monitors set a 2560 by 1440, so the 2020 so can get small on small monitors, so how about just the last 2 numbers?

This is easier to read on any screen. I used the same PR that came from the original icon and just added a large 20, not it is Arial black and not whatever font Adobe is using, but at least it quickly tells you the version!

And yes I have posted this at Adobe User Voice, and I didn’t see any other posts about it, so if you care about this like I do, please vote.

Why is there no Motion Blur for moving objects in Adobe Premiere Pro?

This is an oldy but a huge annoyance for me. Why is there way to activate Motion Blur on moving objects in Premiere Pro? This was a feature in Apple Final Cut Pro 7, sure it had a slow render, but the machines are faster now. And so many places I work at just do their graphics within Premiere Pro because it is faster and easier (and so many people can’t or won’t use After Effects) and when moving graphics it just looks awful without Motion Blur.
Don’t premiere and After Effects share at least some of the engine? Premiere Pro needs damn Motion Blur and has for a long time!

Red Giant Updates VFX Suite to 1.5 a paid upgrade

Red Giant has released a paid upgrade to it’s VFX Suite to version 1.5. It is a $199 upgrade unless you are subscriber to Red Giant Complete (feels like a 1.5 should have been a free upgrade).
It includes a new Lens Distortion tool to easily figure out lens distortion to help composite and even track.
And they have updated Supercomp with an automatic color matching, color space options, optical glow and layer glow tools, though I am mostly pissed that they have not figured out how to include motion blur which has been my main objection to supercomp.
Optical Glow has been updated with the ability to control radiate which gives directionality, control per channel size and size xy. This certainly makes for an impressive update over the built in glow.
And Shadow and Reflection has added the ability to show shadows only as well as distort based on the image.
I am glad for the update, though as I said I would like them to put motion blur into supercomp to really make it usefull.

Adobe introduced Creative Cloud Public Beta

So Adobe is releasing Public Beta from within creative cloud.

If you look in your creative cloud application you will see the Beta Apps on the left, which I have highlighted with red. Currently it is for the Video Suite, though they will add all apps eventually. The apps use the same plug ins as the current version.

And when you open the app you get 2 new buttons.

The will be blue every time their are new features and you can read about them.

And the second lets you report bugs and go the forum for the beta.

Already there have been almost daily updates.

And they fixed the issue I was having with After Effects 2020 and Alexa footage, though I wish you could remove the damn forced AMIRA LUT entirely from the workflow.

Adobe After Effects (Beta) Version 17.1.0 (Build 55) once again works with Alexa Footage

So Adobe today released Beta’s of apps in the Creative Cloud app that anyone can download, and so I decided to test the Alexa test footage and my own footage, and all of it works fine. So this was certainly a bug and it is fixed in the Beta.

I would love to be able to check the release notes to see what they fixed, but I haven’t figured out if there are release notes for these public betas.

EDIT:

OK was still having some weirdness when I opened up a project that is working fine in 2020. I was still getting the weirdness when trying to play back the sequences, but if I reload the footage it then works fine, and this did not work in 2020. WTF!

Oh well it actually works now, so no complaints.