Adobe CS5 has been released and I can’t wait to install it. While I’ve noticed a lot of excitement around the web for Photoshop CS5, it’s been a rather divisive upgrade for the After Effects community. Many After Effects artists anticipate the upgrade to be lackluster or even disruptive to getting things done. Since After Effects CS5 is now 64bit and only 64bit, many are upset that their 32bit plugins won’t work anymore and need to be upgraded, and that the other major new feature, the rotobrush tool, won’t work for anything but the easiest shots, which are easy to begin with anyway, so what’s the point in paying for this new feature?

Personally, if the only upgrade to After Effects CS5 was 64bit, I’d be overjoyed. There’s nothing more maddening than being unable to render a frame in your timeline because of memory issues, be it in a RAM Preview, output to disk, or working interactively in the application. The dreaded error I’m talking about of course is “After Effects error: could not create image buffer”. This error has the potential to disappear with this release, given your workstation is souped up with RAM.

Indeed, I think many After Effects artists do not realize what a massive overhaul this is, and how much easier it’s going to be to work interactively and render with the application. Those 32 gigs of RAM you have in your workstation actually mean something beyond having a million tabs open in Firefox while you wait for your render to finish, which is crawling because After Effects CS4 is limited to 4GB of RAM, and is using swap space to avoid spitting out an image buffer error. Yes, that’s right, your renders will be much faster at higher resolutions, even if you’re not being given an error. I think once artists start using CS5 they’ll realize how much more sanity they have when working on HD, 2K and 4K projects. You folks that are delivering for non-standard ultrawide displays, such as for stadiums, buildings and museums will be stunned at what a difference 32GB of RAM will make compared to the 4GB you were limited to. It’s funny, I heard one guy say that 64bit support should have been a .5 upgrade, and I was like “Are you out of your mind?! They had to rewrite the entire application!” Finally, After Effects artists will no longer be snickered at by their fellow Nuke and Inferno compositors that have already been working in 64bit for sometime. 32bit was great when our resolutions were NTSC 640×480, but those days are long gone.

The lack of a 64bit wrapper for 32bit plugins is a mixed bag, but ultimately, I’m really glad 32bit plugins won’t work. With paradigm shifts like this, I think it’s all or nothing. The adoption rate from plugin developers would be less than a trickle in the Sahara if they weren’t forced to rewrite their plugins for true 64bit. This would have been a great opportunity for Adobe to introduce some standardization for plugin licensing, but it looks like they dropped the bag on that already. Anyone who’s had to build or maintain an After Effects render farm knows the jungle of mess licensing is with 3rd party plugins and I wish Adobe would at least encourage best practices while developers rewrite their plugins.

Unfortunately, due to the plugin issue, I do think migration from CS4 to CS5 will take longer than it already does, which is typically most of a product cycle. I for one, will keep After Effects CS4 around until I find a replacement for Stefan Minning’s plugin called Normality. Unfortunately, the developer will not be updating it to 64bit.

On the After Effects scripting side, not much has changed, other than some deprecations and a few nice features. You can now read/write layer labels (the colored square next to the layer), which will be useful for making persistent selections for script batch operations. The upgrades to Mocha is nice too, especially the ability to import Mocha shapes in After Effects, which is pretty huge. That combined with the rotobrush finally makes After Effects an excellent choice for roto and tracking. I pretty much avoid rotoscoping whenever I can, but I think the rotobrush tool will be pretty useful, especially for making mattes that don’t need fine detail, such as for localized color corrections. I’m curious if you can specifically shoot footage for the rotobrush, when a green screen isn’t available, but I’m not sure how it’s tracking and edge detection works.

I’m very excited to see Premiere’s enhanced performance. I’m a huge fan of dynamic link and I’m always encouraging people to use it instead of Final Cut when prepping footage for After Effects. Premiere really excels where After Effects doesn’t, and that’s real time video playback. Premiere has been further accelerated with CUDA enabled Nvidia cards and if you’ve never tried dynamic link, or imported a Premiere project into After Effects before, this is the release to do so.

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I wanted to add some thoughts to Chris’s post about Flash and HTML5. However I should preface this post by saying that HTML5 supporting video is really cool, both technically and because HTML5 is an open standard that anyone can implement for free. As we all know, for the last several years, Flash has been the de facto choice for online video delivery. Flash support on different platforms has been pretty good, but end users still don’t have total flexibility depending on their OS. Until recently, Flash on Linux has been about a version behind the release for Windows or OS X. Even now, Adobe only releases a player for x86, and the x86_64 version is unsupported beta software.

Everyone seems to be touting HTML5 video as the “open” alternative to the proprietary Flash plugin required for .flv playback in the browser. But how open is H.264, the codec that powers HTML5 video, and the current pick for encoding video for online delivery? Using H.264 as the codec behind HTML5 video sours things a bit for me. H.264 is encumbered by software patents; to develop or distribute a player or encoder for H.264 you might have to pay a licensing fee to MPEG-LA. Even though MPEG LA announced last week (PDF) that H.264 will remain fee-less for free internet video through 2016, this is not the same as being free or open. MPEG-LA can still go after people that produce the software to encode or decode H.264. And MPEG-LA is not just one organization, it’s a collection of patent holders that have their own agendas.

All this is a bit of a slap in the face to the open standards that power the web. Imagine if you had to pay a half million dollars to create or display JPEGs, GIFs, or HTML… The only people that would be able to afford to make software for the web would be huge companies. But what are our alternatives? Beyond Ogg Theora and Matroska, the pickings are slim. These codecs are open and free, but not necessarily better than H.264. Plus it would be next to impossible to compete with the marketing machine of Apple behind H.264.

Open and free standards have been what has made the Internet successful since its inception. I think it’s important that users understand this so that the Internet of the future cannot be controlled by corporations with enough cash to cover licensing fees.

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There’s been much discussion and debate recently surrounding the iPad’s lack of Flash, which in turn has fueled discussion about the future of online video delivery. This week’s preview release of the HTML5-powered SublimeVideo player is seen by some as the beginning of the end for online video delivery in Flash player. As Senior Multimedia Development Consultant at Control Group, I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the topic.

To me, this isn’t so much a debate about Flash/ActionScript 3 versus HTML5, but rather another win for HTML + Flash/AS3! It’s all about creativity as a developer. Bad coding leads to poor applications, proper coding leads to a proper experience. It is a common pitfall that most people think “HTML or Flash”. I see this as more power for the mixing of technologies, raising the cap on what can and can’t be done in a web browser.

Adobe’s technologies provide clear benefits to the end user, but also (and perhaps more importantly) the developer. As a developer, I can utilize the unique capabilities of the .flv format to protect content in some fashion or for metadata injection, all of which can be done on the fly and server-side, if implemented using Flash Media Server (FMS).  I’m also really excited about Flash Player 10.1 – it brings the ability to scale all the way from mobile to HD flavors, and will be available on smartphones and other Internet-connected mobile devices.

This is about more than just video delivery, it is the platform combined with the tools, and Adobe has been making tremendous strides in going open-source with them. Adobe is providing a cohesive environment that is deeply integrated with some of the best tools out there for content creation. HTML5 is just starting out, and the gap between the tools and technology is too immense to make it the competition. Flash has fantastic penetration and Adobe can rapidly evolve the technology. Remember, HTML5 still is not a standard – in fact we are looking at sometime in 2012 before we’ll see a final recommendation. These are cohesive technologies and they are here to stay for a very long time, which means plugins will be around for a long time too. Simply put,  plugin implementations have the potential to penetrate faster, and as history has shown they often do. Plugins forge the path, and the Web comes right behind them to standardize those paths.

If you want to better understand what the big picture is regarding Adobe and its technologies, I recommend reading a little bit about:

OpenScreenProject
Catalyst
SVG and FXG
Flex Data Services
RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol)
Binary Sockets

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John Nack, the Product Manager for Photoshop, discusses what an Adobe CreativeSuite.app could look like. It is an interesting introduction to a concept called document-centric computing, something I was not familiar with prior to reading this.

As someone who has been supporting Adobe apps for over ten years, I’ve watched Photoshop and Illustrator grow into the giant, powerful apps that they are today. Some would argue that all the new features have created bloated, behemoths of applications. But could this bloat have been avoided without compromising all the amazing features and capabilities that were added along the way? I’m not a software developer, so I have no idea on that one. But the promise of a world where I could design, illustrate, and retouch, using a .adobe file format — and open those files in a single Adobe application — is exciting. It would certainly ease our software deployment process as well…

Nack walks through the hypothetical pros and cons surrounding this computing model. Definitely worth a read.

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I recently attended an Adobe Flex user group meeting here in New York where the title of the presentation was “Zend Server: A Flex Perspective”. I knew that earlier this year, Zend officially announced the Beta release of their new PHP application server product, and as a developer of large scale RIA web applications using PHP and Flex, I was anxious to learn how this new product might impact our next project. The presentation was a good, albeit brief, overview of Zend Server. However, despite the title of the presentation and the theme of the user group, no connection was made between this new product and Flex. I thought I’d try to make that connection here.

A Little Background: Zend?, Zend Server?, Flex?
Zend is known as “The PHP Company”. Their founders are key contributors to the core PHP language and the company focuses on creating products to help improve the entire PHP application development life-cycle experience. They provide products and services to help with configuration and installation, development, deployment and with production application administration and maintenance.

Zend Server dashboard

Zend Server is one of Zend’s most recent products and is a package of several different Zend offerings. On one hand, Zend Server is a certified PHP distribution that includes the most reliable and up-to-date version of PHP, tested PHP extensions, database drivers and comes bundled with Apache. It also wraps a nice, user-friendly interface around the configuration management of PHP, Apache and all these extensions to provide ease of initial environment configuration and maintenance. On the other hand, it is a suite of development components providing tools to ease development and deployment, optimize application performance by speeding up PHP execution and by providing data caching options, and assist in monitoring and debugging multiple environments running remotely. Zend Server comes in two flavors: A free community version and a commercial version. The commercial version has extra features as well as full support from Zend.

Flex is an Adobe development framework that assists in the creation of cross-platform rich internet Flash applications (RIAs). Flex has really opened-up the Flash door to non-Flash developers. It removes the need to work within the esoteric Flash movie “timeline” and allows traditional programmers a more familiar environment in which to build applications. You use the ActionScript scripting language and an XML-based markup language called MXML to build Flex applications.

Adobe Flex Builder 3

Okay, so what does one have to do with the other?
Well, as developers are turning to Flex as a presentation tier to help meet the ever growing demands of Web applications to manage and deliver rich media and deliver rich interactive user experiences, they have to turn somewhere for the application tier to deliver the services and data management that drive these flashy front-ends. To date, Java has been by far the most popular choice for this tier. So much so, that some claim there are no other “real” options. I would never argue against a decision to use Java as the application tier in an n-tier Web application environment. But I do think there are options. And I do believe PHP is one of those options.

Among many professional software developers, PHP has a reputation for not being particularly well-suited to large or extremely complex site implementations. Some even believe that PHP is nothing but a simple templating language, only to be used for initial mockups and quick demonstration POCs, and has no role in serious, production, “Enterprise” applications. I don’t want to go down the long path of refuting such misconceptions. Please take a look at Zend’s own John Coggeshall’s rebuttal of such claims. But one fair criticism of PHP, also acknowledged in Mr. Coggeshall’s article, is that PHP has been weak in “Enterprise” tooling. Java has been in this space for a while, and has several free and commercial application servers from which to choose that provide a wealth of tools and functionality to support serious, enterprise-grade applications. Zend Server is striving to fill this gap in PHP and move PHP onto the short-list of viable options when CTOs, CIOs and Managers are choosing the technology stack on which to run their next next big RIA project.

One last point, with regard to Abode Flex in particular, is that previously there has been no official supported implementation of Adobe’s Action Message Format (AMF) integration with PHP. The teaming of Adobe and Zend to back Zend_Amf, which is part of the Zend Framework bundled with Zend Server, has changed this fact. With the release of Zend_Amf, PHP can now officially speak in the native tongue of Flex’s ActionScript, making integration fast and seamless. This, along with the introduction of Zend Server, goes a long way in support of using PHP as the application server tier behind an Adobe Flex UI.

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