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.

Canon C500 with 4K

canoncinema500

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Electronista actually has the info on this, but Canon has announced a higher end big daddy to the C300, the C500 and C500PL. They both output 10 bit uncompressed RAW footage and simultaneously records 50Mbps HD proxy video to CF cards for easy offline editing (a brilliant idea). It has a super 35MM equivalent CMOS sensor which is 8.85 megapixels.

It has cinema 4L 4096×2160 as well as 3840×2160 for 4k TV, though only records 1080 to the dual CF cards. It does 0-60FPS in 12 bit RGB 4:4:$ or at 10bit YCrRb 4:22 it can go up to 120 FPS.

No pricing has been announced, but this makes Canon a serious contender, as well as having the EOS facility in Los Angeles for support.

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!