cs4 Archives - Paul Conigliaro

February 18, 2009

Red delays Scarlet and EPIC

In an announcement on the Reduser forum this morning, Jim Jannard of Red Digital Cinema has stated they are no longer working overtime to push the release of Scarlet and EPIC. These cameras are still in the pipeline, they have just moved to a more typical development schedule.

I see no reason to continue to pay for rapid development and pushed schedules when the world is not ready to buy our product in the quantities that justify our urgency. […] Retail camera sales are currently off 40-50%.

While it may be a blow to those who were hoping to get their hadns on one of those cameras once they were pre-announced, I can completely understand their decision. If the volume of sales won't be there, it doesn't make sense to push development as hard as they probably were.

Jon Chappell of Digital Rebellion highlights why this isn't such a big deal, which I completely agree with. There may even be an upside. This may translate to more Red One sales, which could mean more support for the Red One in post. We're getting there with RAW support in FCP, AE, and Premiere, but it could stand to be improved… especially 4k support in FCP.

November 24, 2008

AE CS4: Leopard vs Vista

Being a Mac guy who works with After Effects, this news really bothers me. Keven Schmidt at Creative Mac benchmarked renders in After Effects CS4 on Mac OS X and Windows. The result? AE still renders faster in Windows, by roughly 1.2x. Now, AE has traditionally rendered faster in Windows, but now that we're on v9 and OS X has been around for 8 years, you'd think there would be significant improvements. Kevin about sums it up:

Either Adobe isn't tuning After Effects on the Mac at all, or tuning the buhjeezus out of the Windows versions. Hell, even single process rendering on Vista generally spanks multiple processes on Leopard, for the love of Pete.

This, coupled with the continued sub-par performance of Flash on the Mac really makes me doubt Adobe's commitment to the Mac platform. Are they still bitter about Final Cut Pro eating into Premiere sales back in 1998 & 1999?

As a side note, the other takeaway from the post is that enabling multiprocessing in AE doesn't save much time in either platform. For longer renders, it may help, but for those intermediate small batches, you may be better of sticking to single processes. This is something I've suspected for a long time, and I'm glad to see some numbers on this.

September 25, 2008

It is up to us to build amazing things

As you may or may not have heard, Adobe's Creative Suite 4 was released this week. Some new features in After Effects and Photoshop have my curiosity piqued, but it is doubtfull I'll take the plunge into this latest incarnation anytime soon. (That is, not until the post houses and clients I work with begin to use After Effects CS4. Hell, I still have After Effects 6 installed just in case someone still uses that version.)

Of all the posts I've read on the web regarding the new version, Andrew Cramer at VideoCopilot.net has the most solid advise I've seen:

If you look at the big picture, After Effects 6.5 has enough capability to create things that would stop time and newer versions regard this as well. After effects is a compositing application and it is up to us to build amazing things. No new feature is going to do that for us…

Though I'm waiting to see that in the feature list of CS5: "Amazing Builder™ — No designer needed!" Actually, scratch that.

We tend to get caught up in the latest featuresets and plugins ((Don't get me started on Trapcode plugins. Yes, I do use them. But for the love of God, Particular, 3D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your animations and designs 'teh awesomes.')) and can forget that they are just tools. And without us and our imaginations, they just sit idle.

Now I'm tempted to fire up that copy of After Effects 6.5... just because.