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Adobe After Effects 6.5

Adobe After Effects 6.5, the most widely used motion graphics and effects compositing software, shipped in late May as part of Adobe's Video Collection 2.5. The new integration between Audition 1.5, Premiere Pro 1.5, After Effects 6.5, and Encore DVD 1.5 serves the needs of artists, but it's also a great marketing strategy. Evaluated on its own terms, After Effects 6.5 is a measured version with several strong features and two killer features. It's bundled with integrated products from Synthetic Aperture and GridIron. Even if the Video Collection were not a steal at the package price — which it is — After Effects 6.5 would still be a must-have release. Taken as part of an overall workflow solution, After Effects 6.5 is on the verge of providing a level of functionality that makes the Creative Suite and Video Collection as near to a total 2D media solution as we've seen.

Integration is the current dominant philosophy at Adobe. The big news is how Premiere Pro and After Effects work together. You can now copy and paste keyframes between the applications and edit them in either package. Video Collection applications share plug-ins even when they are present in only one application's plug-in folder. For instance, After Effects will detect Premiere Pro plug-ins (and vice versa) and display them in the effects palette (Windows only). Effects sharing was available last year, but this only makes the new keyframe-sharing feature more complete. Other features of the Premiere Pro and After Effects integration include: Transferred Clips keep its folder hierarchy; Premiere Pro sequences can be brought into After Effects as Compositions, including any nested sequences; and Premiere Pro motion properties also travel well, with translation, scale, and rotation settings and their keyframes all capable of being brought into After Effects.

There are several Windows-only exceptions attached to After Effects features in version 6.5. This is irritating to Mac artists, but fortunately, Adobe is supporting the Advanced Authoring Format (AAF). This provides a new level of friendliness between Adobe products and other applications regardless of the OS, although implementation of AAF compatibility will happen over time. While Adobe does not mention it in the reviewer's guide, the Automatic Duck plug-in allows users to import Final Cut Pro data into After Effects. For now it is the best way to use these products together. Much to Adobe's credit, AAF support shows that Adobe is willing to compete on the merits of its software, and not by denying other applications access to its product's workflow.

The After Effects engineering team has always sweated the details of workflow and GUI efficiency. Each software release shows dozens of minute interface tweaks and subtle improvements. If there is an underlying theme to the latest release, it's improved previewing with several different types of enhancements. OpenGL support has been kicked up with a new OpenGL engine. New features include Targeted Preview, which allows the user to select which window to preview. In the past, you were locked into previewing the Comp window only. A related feature is the Video Preview that allows RAM previews to be viewed over FireWire on the display screen of a DV camera.

Other OpenGL improvements enabled by the new render engine are OpenGL renders for RAM previews, more accurate renders for material surfaces, such as Metal, improved rendering of Cone and Direction lighting, and my favorite, OpenGL now displays blend modes. This last improvement makes OpenGL more useful.

RAM caching is improved with the addition of disk caching. When RAM previews were first added to After Effects, it was like buying a fast car with a 5-gallon gas tank. After Effects RAM previews frequently exceeded the available RAM. When RAM previews are too big, After Effects caches the overflow on a hard drive. Even better, disk-cached sequences can be brought back into RAM for playback without rerendering. This is a huge advance for evaluating your work.

Good as disk caching is, there is now a way to supercharge RAM playback. X-Factor by Gridiron, a product that made a big splash at NAB 2004, enables parallel processing for RAM previews. X-Factor allows you to use all the available processors over a network and process your work in the background. The base program and two processor licenses are bundled with After Effects 6.5, with licenses for two nodes. Windows and Mac workstations can be used in a mixed environment with X-Factor. The gain in speed is close to linear: 10 additional processors equal a 10X acceleration. This is a watershed development in desktop production. Until now, desktop systems have succeeded not only on the strength of their price and performance, but also because the talents of thousands of graphic designers were released into the marketplace. Agencies and motion graphic clients were willing to give up the so-called realtime supervised sessions in Flame and Inferno suites to work with the new breed of boutique designers sitting behind Macs. This meant allowing desktop artists to work at their own pace with daily visits and lots of tests sent over the Internet. Those days are over. After Effects running X-Factor with a dozen processors over a network eliminates much of the advantage that once set SGI-based compositing systems apart.

Bundles are a big part of After Effects 6.5. The second most significant new plug-in — after X-Factor — is the inclusion of Synthetic Aperture's color correction software Color Finesse. A little more than two years ago, several of the top NLEs and compositing products added serious color correction capability. Color Finesse emerged as one of the most highly praised standalone solutions. Adobe made the shrewd decision to include Color Finesse in After Effects 6.5 instead of writing its own color corrector. The bundled version is the latest full version of Color Finesse and has all the features you would expect from a color correction tool, with secondary color correction, virtual scopes, and 16-bit precision.

After Effects' image-editing capabilities are further enhanced by the inclusion of Photoshop's Image Adjustment tools, including Auto Color, Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, and the convenient Shadow/Highlight tool. Photoshop Color Filters are also available in After Effects 6.5 and can be imported from Photoshop as Adjustment layers. From the perspective of color and general image editing, Adobe now offers the most sophisticated set of tools for motion graphics. For indie filmmakers, the digital intermediate becomes not only a correction step in the filmmaking process, but also the single most important formal advance for directors in the digital era.

There are also very powerful Grain filters added to After Effects 6.5, courtesy of Grain Surgery, a plug-in product designed and sold by Jonathan Shekter, one of After Effects' software engineers. This may sound incestuous, but in my estimation Grain Surgery is the best grain matching, creation, and removal product of its kind. Now it's included for free.

Filter acquisition is something of a tradition at After Effects. Over the years, Adobe has purchased some of the leading filter sets and added them to After Effects. This time around, Adobe revives one of the oldest and best-liked filter sets: Cycore (aka Final Effects). More than 60 of the original Final Effects plug-ins are included with After Effects 6.5. Many were rewritten to improve their speed and add spatial interaction with an After Effects camera. Surprisingly, none of the filters has been written for 16-bit rendering. This gives After Effects one of the biggest collections of free, high-quality filters. These filters and any others present in the After Effects plug-in folder are available to Premiere Pro. 1.5.

Animation presets fall into the category of predefined assets. This is a set of text animations that can be dropped into an existing project for instant effects. The presets are completely editable, and customized versions can be saved as new presets. It's also possible to create new assets from scratch. After Effects ships with 250 of these effects and text motion templates. Adobe is likely to encourage the inevitable asset sharing that grows up around prefab effects.

The Clone tool has been refined, including the addition of the useful Clone Source Overlay. This is a semitransparent preview area that lets you position a source over the target area. Previously, when cloning an image you worked blindly until you executed the clone. The Clone Palette also features up to five Clone Presets that store alignment offsets and other settings. This is useful when reusing clone effects or refining previously cloned areas.

There are also improvements to the Paint tool. A Straight Line feature has been added, activated by using click selection and keystrokes to define the start and end point of a line. This can be used for individual strokes or as a single stroke made up of sequentially added segments. Which brings us to one of the downsides of painting over time — you end up laying down a lot of strokes. After Effects 6.5 reduces — slightly — the stroke overhead experienced in version 6 by allowing the Erase tool to work without adding additional strokes in the Timeline. While Adobe has done a very good job of bringing Photoshop functionality into After Effects, dynamic brushes are not implemented in After Effects 6.5. We are still stuck with the older-style basic brush parameters from Photoshop's distant past. I expect this is a much-requested capability and a good feature candidate for version 7.

The After Effects engineering team does not quit working on a feature until it's perfect. I can't wait for the next version of its tracker. While the Tracker in After Effects 6.5 is good, it's not perfect. Occasionally, it chokes on a particular shot, whereas RealViz cranks through the same footage without a hitch. Things that have improved since the last version: overall speed and accuracy. There are also specific features and enhancements that bring this into the realm of a professional tracking tool, compared with other products like Combustion. For instance, it's now possible to track the scale of an object. Previously, it was possible to track the position and rotation (or both) but only a single layer. This is useful for pulling out Z-axis rift or a zoom move.

My favorite new tracking features are the magnification of the feature region (up to 400 percent) while you are positioning the selection area and editable motion paths for tracked features, an even more useful improvement. After Effects 6.5 displays the track path as a line of Xs. This is essential for situations when it's faster to tweak motion anomalies by hand, rather than automatically correct them.

Medium-sized enhancements in After Effects 6.5 include guide layers for aligning images and text. The guides appear in the comp window but do not appear in renders. There are also several new features added to the text engine that debuted in version 6. The interface takes some getting used to, but the ability to create complex animation on a letter-by-letter and group basis is far ahead of any other text animation tools on the market. New Text capabilities include the ability to export text animation as Flash files (.swf), the ability to animate characters in random order, and the ability to animate the anchor point. Text anti-aliasing has also been improved. A new Scripting language permits control of text layers and, along with Expressions, provides an astonishing array of text manipulation options.

A curious but unsettling fact for Mac users is support for 3GB of RAM in Windows XP. This may surprise Mac users who thought that the much heralded 64 bitness of Panther and the G5 would allow them to address more RAM. In fact, Mac After Effects 6.5 users can access only 2GB of RAM.

Adobe also added customizable colors for the interface, allowing users the opportunity to create a more comely look for After Effects' otherwise plain-Jane look. This is useful during color correction when you want to reduce color contamination of the monitor.

After Effects improves with every release. Rare are the times when a feature set or interface decision is a poor choice. But it still has areas that could be better. A rare weakness is the F-curves, which are not up to the level of its competitors. After Effects' F-curves get the job done but are cramped and inelegant. Another gap in the feature set is the lack of a node-based or process-tree editor. This approach to effects management is not for everyone, but it is commonplace in most large effects studios. Targeted to the big studios where it is most popular, node-based editing may not be a priority for the After Effects engineering team.

Another potential issue is a problem most software applications wish they had. After Effects must please both non-technical motion graphic artists and extremely sophisticated effects folks. After Effects used to be an easy-to-learn tool with lots of power. As its range and depth has increased, so too has the steepness of the learning curve. To some extent this may be an interface issue: The screen is becoming crowded. By comparison, Combustion is a calmer, decaffeinated interface with lots of power. But it is nowhere as powerful for motion graphics. Still, After Effects could afford a modest makeover.

At $1,499 for the full Professional version, the cost of the Video Collection is almost laughably low. Can you even work in motion graphics without knowing a few Adobe applications? Color Finesse is a $595 bonus, and X-Factor is a paradigm-shifter for desktop production. After Effects remains the best overall compositing and 2D motion design tool for individual artists and boutique shops. Version 6.5 should pay for itself in a few weeks.

Apple Power Mac G5 Dual 2GHz

This is not a test. If you want statistics, Intel, AMD, and G5 performance comparisons are all over the Web. They generally reach the same conclusion: Apple performance is roughly comparable to that of the fastest Wintel systems. Meaningful comparisons are dependent on the type of software used and how well it is written to take advantage of the OS and graphic subsystems. So instead of another exhaustive, out-of-context set of numbers that are dated within a few months, I offer an overview of the G5 and a hard look at 64-bit computing.

Perhaps the most important measure of Apple's longterm prospects and how they will affect digital artists is a question: What other company has a commitment to the content creation market and the ability to control the development of an OS, hardware, and software as an integrated system?

The G5 is built around the IBM 64-bit POWER4 processor. This is generally regarded as a leading design chip with a promising future. This was not the case with Motorola PowerPC 7400 chips, which began to fall behind Intel's Pentium designs with the debut of the G3. There has been speculation from other journalists about whether or not the G5 processor can compete with Intel because economies of scale favor Intel. This argument was pertinent when Motorola was making the chips because it was never able to find a wide market for its chip family other than Apple. However, the IBM POWER4 is used in pSeries 690 servers, a market that will help underwrite development of chips for the G5. It is likely that for the foreseeable future, the G5 will have no problem competing with Intel. However, the late arrival of the second-wave G5, running at a lower clock speed then promised by Jobs last year, is an all too familar refrain — and not just from Apple.

An important part of Apple's game plan is the decision to make the G5 run 64-bit and 32-bit applications natively. This is especially important to developers because this means that during the transition to 64-bit software, both old and new software can achieve optimal performance. AMD's Athlon chips are also backward compatible. That's a good plan except that the Panther OS is not 64-bit, and at the moment there is no API for doing 64-bit applications. So this is still a plan for the future. (For a review of Panther OS, visit millimeter.com)

The G5 was designed from the processor up to handle graphics. This is a weakest-link concept; total system speed depends on the processor receiving and sending data without delay, and if any one part of the system is slow then much of the advantage of any single fast component is squandered. The processors, the hard drive, and system memory have to operate at the same level. By today's standards, the G5 has highly competitive performance from each of these components, although the absence of PCI express in the new G5 may become an issue in the future if not addressed.

To begin with, the fastest Mac bus on a G4 was 167MHz. Compare that with the G5, which sports a 1GB frontside bus for each 2GHz processor. That's a huge advance. This is a dual unidirectional 64-bit architecture with data moving in both directions simultaneously (32 bits in each direction). This does away with inefficient arbitration as the processor and system controller negotiate usage of the bus.

The G5 has room for 8GB of 400GHz DDR SDRAM flying over a 128-bit memory bus (actually 16GB with the new 2GB chips). Previously the limit in a G4 was 2GB of RAM, the same as most PC's. But wait, this is not quite so simple. The largest contiguous hunk of RAM space available is 4GB, although Panther does not have addressing window extensions for accessing more than 2GB. There are, however, coding techniques to get around this limit, including the “mmap” solution as well as factoring an application in to multiple sections, each with its own 32-bit address space. This would allow developers to use more than 4GB of RAM in certain situations.

There are other ways to benefit from the 16GB RAM capacity of the G5; because Panther has efficient multi-tasking, each open program can address 4GB of RAM. So while a 16GB RAM preview in After Effects or Maya is probably not permitted in the new system, Panther has broken through several of the RAM limitations of the past.

Apple chose to use Serial ATA drives with independent channels of 150Mbps fast access allowing for 7 simultaneous streams of SD video in Final Cut Pro. You can have up to 500GB of internal storage. External drives can be connected via USB or FireWire 400(2) or 800(1) ports. FireWire 800 drives are just appearing, but they are not twice as fast as FW 400 drives as the numbers might lead you to believe. In actual practice, sustained speed gains with FireWire 800 are about 25 percent to 30 percent over FW 400. That works out to approximately 30Mbps for the FW 400 and 42Mbps for FW 800.

The G5 boasts the best case and interior design I've encountered in several years of reviewing systems. The case is solid aluminum and not just a thin veneer. Aesthetics aside, the layout and quality of the manufacturing inside the case is in a class by itself. The G5 has precision parts that snap cleanly together, and there's room to move your hand while adding RAM without dislocating your wrist. Hard drives and graphic cards are easily accessed. Absolutely a dream to work on.

As processor speeds have increased, the need for serious cooling has introduced a pernicious fan noise with all dual-proc workstations. The G5 has largely overcome this issue by adding smaller fans in larger numbers. Nine, to be exact. The G4 sounded like an international airport when the fans kicked in, but the G5 with 21 discreet thermal sensors is whisper quiet. If you are using your Mac as an audio workstation, this is welcome news.

There are three 133MHz PCIx expansion slots on the dual-proc G5s, which may not be enough for some desktop artists. There are real-world limitations with daisy chaining large hard drives, and many high-end users dedicate a port to each drive for mission-critical work, such as HD. So, it's possible to run out of FireWire ports, and that means adding another card. With I/O boards and high-end audio cards it's possible to tap out all three slots.

The G5 has an AGP 8X Pro graphics controller, achieving a 533MHz data rate, but here is one of the few limitations of the G5: The fastest graphic cards are not available for the Mac. This is a vendor relations issue not a hardware limitation. You have three choices for your Mac: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and 9600 Pro or the Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 Ultra. Both ATI and Nvidia make much faster cards (with more graphic and video options) then the mid-level options available for the G5.

This is a big issue for Maya or Lightwave users whose scenes can easily choke the fastest cards with big data sets. It's not just a problem for 3D users; ATI is introducing HD-capable cards, none of which is available for the Mac. Nvidia has a new SDI-capable card coming out that opens up new areas for graphics professionals, and again, it won't be available for the current G5. After getting so many things right in the G5, this omission seems to be a philosophical issue for Apple Engineering because there is no real reason not to work with hardware developers to support all the latest cards and capabilities.

Lastly, there is the minor annoyance of the three-button mouse. You can certainly buy one for a G5 because it's supported, but at this point it should really be standard equipment.

It's fairly obvious that I'm amped about the G5. This is a major architectural advance for Apple and lays down the gauntlet to everyone else. But to put this in perspective, the competition is all clustered around the same general level of performance. Windows has a few more software apps on the 3D side, and Apple has an OS based on UNIX, which I have found to be more stable than XP (but this is hard to quantify). Apple and AMD are early adopters of 64-bit. This turns out to be less of an advantage than advertised.

The general industry buzz is that for the first time in several years, developers are interested in the Mac again although Adobe is sending out mixed signals, not the least of which is the edict at last year's NAB to avoid having Macs at the booth. Still, overall Apple is on a tear, and the evidence seems to show that it will continue to be the most interesting hardware and OS combination for content creators.

The pressure on Mac to continue to innovate is much greater than it is for Windows or Intel, which is what a monopoly is all about. So, we can expect to see Apple take bigger chances and continue to make products specifically for our industry. That last sentence explains why I will continue to have Macs alongside my PCs.

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64-Bit

Few recent technologies have been misunderstood more than 64-bit computing. While it delivers the benefit of raising the limit on accessible memory (with exceptions), it does not, as many people believe, represent an across-the-board boost in performance.

To begin with, here's a highly simplified explanation of what 64-bit computing actually does. First, you need to understand that 64-bit refers to a CPU's data stream. More specifically, 32-bit and 64-bit indicate the size of the integers a microprocessor can handle for a single calculation. This is quite different from saying that it can handle more chunks of numbers per clock cycle. If a CPU is operating on small integers normally accommodated by a 32-bit system, then 64-bit will not speed things up. The notion that more 32-bit numbers can be sent along the data path on a 64-bit system is incorrect; however, bigger integers can be sent to the processor allowing for higher precision in fewer clock cycles.

Not all calculations require the full range of integers that 64-bit affords. However, cryptography, scientific computing, simulations, and other special cases certainly benefit from 64-bit code. For this reason, only some parts of an OS or a software program are likely to be rewritten to utilize 64-bit calculations. Graphic software applications are good candidates for a 64-bit makeover — any place where high-performance math may be required.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.