I am most excited about the new JavaScript Engine for expressions and especially the ability to save your favorite expressions in a library!
And I am excited that the new Mocha included is a plug in instead of a stand alone application. I have not upgraded to the latest Mocha as it is a bit expensive, so am glad that this has been updated.
I am just hoping that this fixes some of the problems I have been having lately with UHD projects and not being able to open without either trashing my prefs (which also trashed my Workspaces) or importing the project into a fresh project which works until I have to re-open it. This has been incredibly frustrating!
So I am running After Effects CC 15.1.2 on a MacPro 5,1 with 32 GB of RAM NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 with 4GB of VRAM on MacOS High Sierra 10.13.4. I have 6GB reserved for other applications, so am running with 26GB of RAM.
I am running UHD 29.97 P ProRES HQ footage, and it mostly works fine while I am running, but I do get crashes sometimes, and the problem is either with a crash or with saving and closing and re-opening the project. When I re-open the project I get the error After Effects error: Unable to allocate enough memory to render the current frame.
This happens as soon as the project has re-opened, and happens immediately as soon as the project opens, and it happening every time with different projects and different footage (though all UHD 29.97 ProRES HQ.
I have found 2 workarounds that let me keep working, but are both a major pain in rear end.
The first workaround is If I open a new project and import the old project things work fine until I close AE or it crashes, then the same problems occurs.
The second is to hold down shift-option-command and delete the preferences when I re-open, but this also trashes my custom workspaces. And it seems Custom Workspaces no longer sync anymore? As if I restore my Preferences from the Sync my workspaces don’t come back (I know these used to sync, why don’t they sync anymore?).
Any solutions would be greatly appreciated as this is really frustrating.
I tried a couple of tests on my Surface Pro and the setup was quick and easy, though pretty brutal render times, though I am sure my tower would be much faster.
Here is an animation I did of a portrait of my lovely wife.
Master Properties within the Essential Graphics Panel now show up when you nest a sequence in After Effects so you can control the effects within the current sequence along with master properties. And you can have different effects with the same sequence now allowing for all your changes without duplicating a composition. VERY COOL!
The puppet tool has become the Advanced Puppet Tool, with new functionality and smoother deformations. And it nows deals with deformations to curve and bend your animations.
More VR support includes Adobe Immersive Environment and improved VR Plane to Sphere.
Essential Graphics Panel has been improved. 2D point, scale and angle propeties. You can add all transform group properties. You can drag multiple selected properties. You can undo and redo adding removing and reordering properties. When you duplicate a composition in the project panel it also duplicated properties and comments. You can also right click a property in the essential graphics panel and reveal it in the timeline.
You can now use the Property Link pick whip to create complex animations so you don’t need to use expressions. It is in the parent & link section.
You can now open a Motion Graphics Template as a project.
There are Data-driven animation improvements, with support for comma or tab separated value files. Each individual property has an expression applied.
The Video Limiter is GPU accelerated and compresses luminance and chorminace.
The Lumetri Color Custom Lut Directory works in After Effects as well as Premiere Pro.
Improved GPU memory usage.
Grain effects CPU performance has been improved.
Added Video formats, and hardware acceleration for h.264 in windows as well as dropping quicktime 7 era formats and codecs.
A new importer for BMP, FIG and animated GIF that no longer depends on quicktime.
Team Projects has been improved with improved presence for online collaborators, better project management and render a team project using teamproject flag.
The missing files dialog has been consolidated to show all the missing files.
You can disable the missing fonts dialogue.
You can disable proxies for multiple footage items.
You can copy and paste in the project panel into a selected folder.
You can drag properties from the timeline panel to the composition panel to create text layers. And use value of text layer to represent a value for JSON data sources.
You can center anchor points in new shape layers. This is an option in preferences.
You can create shapes or masks from text creates a layer above the selected layer.
Darken, Lighten and Soft Light blend modes have been updated to the same engine as photoshop.
Many people know that LUTS or look up tables are a feature in Adobe Premiere’s Lumetri controls that you can use different settings to make camera RAW footage look good for rec 709 or whatever format you are editing in. And Premiere has some technical and various Creative LUTs to quickly fix or change footage. And you can use your own LUT, but you have to select that LUT individually every time from your hard drive, as there is no way to add it to the menus in Premiere or After Effects.
Well a quick Google search has various links to sites that explain how you can add your own LUTs to Premiere Pro. Here is one at Premium Beat. The thing is there is a problem with this method.
In this method you open the application package contents, go into the Contents/Lumetri/LUTs/Technical folder and add your LUT and restart the program. Obviously this is something that is changing the actual application so it should be done at your own risk, and any update will likely wipe out your LUTs, but if you are going to do it, YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS!
If you want the LUTs to work in Premiere and to be able to export them with Adobe Media Encoder or use them in Adobe After Effects you need to also install your LUTs into those programs as well. There is no central repository for these LUTs!
Now I have requested with Adobe that they add the ability to add your own LUTs to the menus in a central repository, but that doesn’t mean the feature will be added ever.
For quite some time I have been wanting a new Whale of a Tale Productions logo, and I have need for one in 4K as I have been posting some of my DJI Osmo Test Footage on YouTube.
I had recently upgraded a really old logo that had been NTSC to 4K, but wasn’t too impressed with the results, so I decided to create a new one that more closely resembled my new Business card.
So I went to trusty After Effects CC 2017 14.2, as well as Element 3D and Red Giant Tsunami and created the following logo bumper for Whale of a Tale Productions.
Someday I will tackle one in full 3D where the logo can interact with the water, but not right now. For now I am pretty happy with this one.
I am most excited to see the Essential Sound Panel makes it way to Premiere Pro!
Having full Lumetri in After Effects is also very cool, and will be quite helpful, though as you know I still mourn the loss of SpeedGrade as Lumetri is not nearly as powerful. And that in many cases means I have to go to DaVinci instead of being able to finish within Creative Cloud.
I am also interested in the Essential Graphics Panel, which brings both direct graphics creation on the timelines as well as changes to templates made in After Effects.
I am also interested in seeing Camera Shake DeBlur and seeing how it does with Warp Stabilized Footage.
The new Multi-Channel tools in Audition are also intriguing, though I would be happier having them in Premiere (especially if I could automatically move multiracks to multiple tracks instead of a single track), as while I do finish some jobs using Audition and it’s Essential Sound Panel, but mostly I go to a mixer using ProTools.
And having Pond 5 in the Adobe Stock panel is a great addition.
Overall I always look forward to playing with the new features, and am glad they come out as often as they do.
I shot some test footage with 3 of my cameras, my DJI OSMO+ my Canon 60D and my iPhone 6S. I color corrected the footage using DaVinci Resolve 12.5 and did the Visual Effects in Adobe After Effects.
The visual effects include adding the gun shots, light flashes, and color correcting the orange tip of my gun so it is gray.
I was trying to show my ability to color match the footage from such different 3 cameras, as well as add the visual effects to make an interesting little sequence.
