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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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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