PVC Review of After Effects CS6

Chris and Tish Meyer have an After Effects CS6 Review.

•Ray-Traced 3D Rendering Engine sounds great, but very also limited at this point. And it only works with CUDA cards not the few AMD Laptop cards approved for Premiere Pro.

•3D Camera Tracker is covered. It sounds pretty automated, but I am very excited to have Shadow Catcher layers, a white solid which only receives shadows. It basically sounds very good, but not as good as the Foundry’s excellent CameraTracker which has more options.

•Track in Mocha is a new feature that allows you to send files to Mocha instead of having to import files yourself. A feature that will make Mocha a more integrated tracker.

•Rolling Shutter Repair that removes Jello Cam from CMOS DSLR.

•Variable Mask Feathering is a feature I have been missing since Shake, and I am glad as hell to see it in After Effects. To do it you just Option drag on a mask point.

•Global Performance Cache where RAM Previews are retained in memory to save re-renders.

•Persistent Disk Cache all RAM Cache’s are saved to disk with projects, and you can Cache work area in background.

•Faster Graphics Pipeline is an update to how OpenGL is handled (which is how some AMD cards are supported). And NVIDIA cards are 150-250% faster and possibly 16 times faster, but mostly under windows.

Also

•Automatic Duck Pro Import After Effects is included

•CycloreFX HD is now bundled

•Drop Shadow, Spill Supressor, Timewarp, Transform, Set Matte, Photo Filter, Fill and Linear, Iris, Radial Wipe Transitions have been updated for 32 Bit.

•Apply Color LUT supports CineSpace,, Irrisad and Speedgrade files.

•Arriraw can be imported

•MXF OPIa video codecs can be exported

•Render only machines don’t need serial numbers

•Many Scripting additions have been added.

Things that were removed.

•Photoshop Live 3D layers are no longer supported.

•FreeForm AE is no longer bundled.

•Custom Pixel Bender effects are no longer supported

•CS6 can only save to CS5.5 no but CS5

More changes can be seen at Todd Kopriva’s blog.

Adobe shows off Production Premium CS6 and it looks Amazing!

Macworld has an in depth article on the new Production Premium CS6 showing off it’s new features, and it does sound exciting.

Premier Pro CS6 is getting unlimited dynamic Multi-cam, built in Image Stabilization with Warp Stabilizer from AE CS5.5 and an enhanced Mercury Playback engine that will even work with some AMD video cards instead of just NVIDIA CUDA cards. It ha s anew Default Workspace, and is more customizable. It has more Audio Mixing controls. Trimming controls have been added and more customizing. A rolling Shutter repair. And of course the addition of Automatic Duck for interoperability between Final Cut Pro 7 and AVID and Premiere Pro. And it will edit 5K for RED compatibility.

Yes! Adobe has been listening and it looks like Premiere Pro CS6 is going to be a power house editing tool!

After Effects CS6 has enhancements to it’s render cache, were renders can be saved with projects, a full 3D camera Tracker, a Ray Trace 3D rendering engine (that looks to give Zaxwerks a run for it’s money), variable mask feathering, and built in Automatic Duck, so it will work with Avid Media Composer and Final Cut 7 files! Nice! Mocha will also be better integrated so you can launch Mocha from within AE (and Mocha is set to get updates at NAB as well).

A new edition to the suite is Prelude CS6 for ingest, logging and organization as well as transcoding of files.

Audition CS6 also gets updated and has smooth project exchange between Premiere Pro and third party nonlinear editors. Has real time clip stretching, automatic speech alignment and pitch correction. Better control surface control with automation.

And an exciting new addition is this suits version of Color, the recently purchases SpeedGrade. A 64 Bit GPU accelerated Color Correction tool. This is really necessary especially with DaVinci software basically being made free from Black Magic.

It really sounds like Adobe has been listening, and is making their editing suite a powerhouse that can really replace Final Cut Pro 7 and easily go head to head with AVID with even more powerful tools. I can’t wait to try this suite out!

Magic Bullet Denoiser 2 Released!

This was announced by Red Giant today. After losing the technology license behind Magic Bullet Denoiser they had to pull it earlier this year from their site, and promised a ground up re-write, and this is it, and even better it is a free upgrade.

Here is a list of features:

  • We’ve developed Magic Bullet Denoiser II from scratch (completely new code) to bring you the quality of Denoiser 1, but with more stability. Red Giant owns this code 100% – which means the product is not going anywhere.
  • We have spent lots of time developing the default settings for Denoiser II to give you the best possible look as soon as you apply. There’s is always room to tweak setting, but often you won’t need to.
  • Currently Denoiser II is only available for After Effects, but it will support multiple host apps in the future (readTHIS FAQ for more info).
  • Denoiser II is a Free Update for all Denoiser 1 and Magic Bullet Suite users. I repeat: If you already owned a license of Denoiser or bought the Magic Bullet Suite after Denoiser was discontinued, you get Denoiser II for FREE.

If you own it, or the Magic Bullet Suite, download it here. If you are new to the program, you can buy it here.

I love Denoiser, and used it extensively on my latest the Misadventures of Bear short, but did find it a bit buggy, so I can’t wait to try out the new version and see what it can really do.

PHYX releases Defocus for FCP, Motion and After Effects

Creative Cow has the press release on this new defocus tool that works with Noise Industries FX Factory.

Some Features are

  • Chroma Aberration – Editors can simulate chroma aberration – the imbalance of RGB color channels that can occur with camera lenses.
  • Fast Defocus – This effect can be used to simulate ‘bokeh,’ or out-of-focus lens effects. Editors can create depth of field with the use of a depth mask, rack-focus effects, and more.
  • Pan / Tilt – A popular effect used in many motion pictures and music videos, users can create a tilt-shift setup for still and motion picture cameras, with smooth, defocused gradients.
  • Vignette Vision – With two effects options, editors can defocus either the outer edge or the center of the image. Defocusing the outer edge simulates POV shots, vintage lenses and more. Defocusing the center of the image allows editors to censor images, create hallucinations, etc.

You can read all about it at Noise Industries Site.

Magic Bullet has updated Magic Bullet Suite to 11.1.2

Red Giant has updated it’s Magic Bullet suite to 11.1.2 including removing Magic Bullet Denoiser. Here are their listed changes:
PhotoLooks 1.5.2

  • Those of you installing PhotoLooks along with the entire suite may have noticed categories that show up in the Looks drawer that happen to be empty – this occurs because Looks created for Looks 2.0 used new tools and aren’t usable in PhotoLooks (yet). We’ve fixed things up for now so you wont see a bunch of empty categories – only categories that have Looks you want.
  • “Save Image As” in the Photo LooksBuilder was never meant to be left in the application and was not working correctly. It has been removed completely. Use the host app you launch PhotoLooks from to save your images.
  • For those of you who also use QuickLooks, there was a bug in the installer that would cause all of your QuickLooks presets to disappear after installing PhotoLooks. We’ve fixed this up.

Looks 2.0.4

  • For those of you using Looks 2.0 in Sony’s Vegas Pro on non-English 32-bit Windows systems, we’ve fixed up the truly annoying OMP error that pops up on your screen.

Colorista II 1.0.5

  • In Premiere Pro, dragging the power mask preview outline was not lining up with the actual mask. We’ve sorted this all out and it’s working great.

Grinder 1.5.1

  • The Timecode Start setting was always working in ‘Continuous’ mode – ‘Reset’ and ‘Time of Day’ were being ignored – all fixed up.
  • Choosing “Original + Timecode” as the main format option was causing the timecode to be off by a factor of 100. We’ve got the math all working now and you’ll get the results you’re looking for.

Bye-Bye Denoiser 1.0

Stu at Prolost on Pimping your After Effects

Stu at Prolost has a great article on pimping out After Effects, what settings he uses, and some must have scripts.

On the scripts, BG Renderer is a must, at $29.99 it allows you to not only render in the background, but also to e-mail you when a render is done, so you can walk way, and know right when it is ready continue.

And of course Stu’s own DV Rebel Tools are also another must have.