After Effects to become a real-time color corrector with tech from Speed Grade?

[Jason Myres]

I initially thought Speed Grade, after a bit of an Adobe re-make, would become another included app in Creative Suite. However, today I read this post ( http://www.studiodaily.com/blog/?p=8098 ) on Studio Daily suggesting what might be coming in AE CS6. Take a look at that list of bullet points. With AE's compositing horsepower, combined with GPU-Acceleration (finally), sequence import, a complete set of waveforms, and the color correction tools from Speed Grade, you'd literally have a mini-Pablo.

JM

[Maxi Claudio]

This could be nice. Love AE!

[Kwan Khan]

Thanks for sharing

[jake blackstone]

I initially thought Speed Grade, after a bit of an Adobe re-make, would become another included app in Creative Suite. However, today I read this post ( http://www.studiodaily.com/blog/?p=8098 ) on Studio Daily suggesting what might be coming in AE CS6. Take a look at that list of bullet points. With AE's compositing horsepower, combined with GPU-Acceleration (finally), sequence import, a complete set of waveforms, and the color correction tools from Speed Grade, you'd literally have a mini-Pablo.

JM
Not one of the bullet points in the list refers to the color grading in AE. AE is a compositing application and should be used as such. Grading in AE is a losing proposition as it's interface doesn't lend itself to doing it efficiently. Nothing in that article challenges the original thought, that Speedgrade will end up as a stand alone application.

[Nick Noev]

what jake said.

[Peter Moretti]

I've heard that it will remain a standalone interface w/ a "Send to Speedgrade" function built into Premiere. That doesn't mean that what I heard is correct, but it seems to be from someone who's knowledgeable.

[M.Halsell]

The After Effect i.e. CoSa interface circa 1993 is a bit tired now. Adobe lucked out brilliantly with Photoshop over the years, allowing Adobe to expand within the creative space. There certainly have been pockets of success within the niche -- Photoshop, Flash and now Premiere, but the whole suite thingy has had a very hodgepodge feel to it. I wouldn't expect Speedgrade to fare any better. But on the otherhand something is better than nothing.

And Speedgrade like any other serious, sophisticated grading software, needs a matching hardware ecosystem to work professionally. Adobe will certainly try to convince users that a suped up video is all that is needed to be a finishing tool and leave the user to figure out how to shoehorn a proper post workflow around omitted or misleading pieces of information. Love em or hate em BlackMagic at least is giving its userbase a completely well thought out software and hardware solution.

[paulherrin]

I would love to see a total revamp of the After Effects interface...

[Christoffer Glans]

Just jizzed in my pants... I have just started adding compositing and grading to my work skills and assignments. Just downloaded DaVinci Resolve and with this on the way..... gosh, I think my investments in all these companies will make my machine have all the capabilities it can have for post production. Put a 4K Red projector in here and I'm all set to edit in Avid MC 6, grading in either Resolve or AE, do compositing in AE and all this in 4K.

1 year ago I had just MC 5.0 on my laptop, this year I can do 4K post production. I can only dream of what I'll be able to do a year from now!

[David Battistella]

Not one of the bullet points in the list refers to the color grading in AE. AE is a compositing application and should be used as such. Grading in AE is a losing proposition as it's interface doesn't lend itself to doing it efficiently. Nothing in that article challenges the original thought, that Speedgrade will end up as a stand alone application.

I completely agree with this statement. From Colorista to this. A Grading app is a grading app. A compositor is a compositor.

David

[Jeremy Neish]

The After Effect i.e. CoSa interface circa 1993 is a bit tired now.

I wholeheartedly disagree. I've been using AE since it was CoSa 1.5, and it's interface is about as perfect as you can get in my opinion. I've tried all the other compositing programs on the market, and I find their node-based and other bizarre UI concepts confusing and slow to work with. In addition, I love that for the most part AE's UI is based on standard GUI conventions. My least favorite thing about programs like Shake, Smoke, Scratch, Nuke and even RedCine X, is that they their UIs is very inconsistent and non-standard. I shouldn't need to re-learn everything I now about UI just to use one program, AE doesn't do that, it sticks to standard conventions.

I'd happy challenge the best compositors & colorists in the world using any of the programs listed above and I guarantee I can do more and at least keep up with them AE.

Adobe, if you are listening, whatever you do... Do NOT revamp the AE UI . It's perfect.

[John Tissavary]

I wholeheartedly disagree. I've been using AE since it was CoSa 1.5, and it's interface is about as perfect as you can get in my opinion. I've tried all the other compositing programs on the market, and I find their node-based and other bizarre UI concepts confusing and slow to work with. In addition, I love that for the most part AE's UI is based on standard GUI conventions. My least favorite thing about programs like Shake, Smoke, Scratch, Nuke and even RedCine X, is that they their UIs is very inconsistent and non-standard. I shouldn't need to re-learn everything I now about UI just to use one program, AE doesn't do that, it sticks to standard conventions.

I'd happy challenge the best compositors & colorists in the world using any of the programs listed above and I guarantee I can do more and at least keep up with them AE.

Adobe, if you are listening, whatever you do... Do NOT revamp the AE UI . It's perfect.


I'll bite. I'll race you to conform & color correct a feature film with a mere 1400 edits. You'll use AE and whatever keyboard / mouse / tablet you have, and I'll use either Scratch or Resolve and a control surface. Anyone care to make a friendly wager?

[Jeremy Neish]

I'll bite. I'll race you to conform & color correct a feature film with a mere 1400 edits. You'll use AE and whatever keyboard / mouse / tablet you have, and I'll use either Scratch or Resolve and a control surface. Anyone care to make a friendly wager?

LOL... Don't wager on me, I'm mostly full of bluster on this. You would of course win, but I wouldn't be as far behind as you'd expect. Doesn't change the fact that AE's UI is perfect for the wildly varied roles it fulfills. And in fact I might just win if suddenly you found yourself needing to do something your tool and proprietary UI was bad at or worse not capable of doing at all. Short of full 3D object rendering, I've found very little AE can't do.

[Bruce Allen]

LOL... Don't wager on me, I'm mostly full of bluster. You would of course win, but I wouldn't be as far behind as you'd expect. Doesn't change the fact that AE's UI is perfect for the wildly varied roles it fulfills. And in fact I might just win if suddenly you found yourself needing to do something your tool and proprietary UI was bad at or worse not capable of doing at all. Short of full 3D object rendering, I've found very little AE can't do.

I love AE too, but definitely hope the interface doesn't stay the same.

The small things they've done recently are good - EG little flowchart navigation thing above your comp window, search function for comps, more label color options.

More stuff would be appreciated, though!

The most glaring points in my mind:
- Interface for doing stereoscopic work is terrible (and I've done over a dozen theatrical stereo projects in AE so I know...) - at minimum, it needs to allow me to apply a filter to multiple views or a single eye only
- It should have better caching of renders (and remember them if you quit and re-load)
- Organization gets awful once you go > 100 layers (we need folders, groups, something...)
- Paradigm of one row per clip gets very cumbersome when you get to long projects. If there was an option to make it like other apps - and have V1, V2 etc - and you could have multiple clips per V channel, each with their own effects.
- Working with a project with a lot of pre-comps gets messy quickly if you're not careful - I'd love it if it could automatically put my precomps in folders sorted by what comp they feed into
- It can't read or write timecode from EXR files and in general working with EXR files is slow and bad (hope they work with the ProEXR guy or some Iridas folks on this)
- You can't copy a stack of effects (eg a color grade) to a keyboard shortcut memory and then paste them onto another layer by hitting that keyboard shortcut
- Image sequences should be able to render to their own folders (not via a script - should be built in option)
- Frame output settings for image sequences should allow different defaults than _####
- Zero conform tools
- I shouldn't have to look up that ToComp(whatever) expression whenever I want to make something's (x,y) coordinates = something else's position in (x,y) screen space (for doing, say, 3D lens [/B]flares, objects attached to nulls, etc). You should be able to right click and say "absolute values" or "screen space"
- Too many effects use pixel values, making it laborious to promote your comp to a higher resolution (eg 4K)
- Needed: Variable-width feathered masks (that you can attach to tracking points)
- Color-Managed linear workflow is overly confusing and for some reason can't playback realtime
- Workflow with a good tracker (eg Mocha) is painful. Needs to be integrated much better
- General responsiveness is slow, doesn't make use of GPU or all of my cores (spawning a separate process to render other frames is a hack and is not the future)
- You should be able to render with 32-bit precision but save to RAM buffer as 16-bit float (at the moment 32-bit mode uses too much RAM and is too slow)

How about those?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

[Dermot]

A Grading app is a grading app. A compositor is a compositor.

David
*cough* Pablo *cough* Mystika.... and who knows what shows up at NAB

[fALk Gärtner]

after effects "sophisticated compositing app" - I nearly spilled my tee.
You guys spending thousands of dollars on really good gear and lenses and all that and then you use after effects for compositing? srsly?
AE UI perfect - for compositing? Really not - you need to spit out the adobe pill thats been getting more and more sour over the last years (except with premiere maybe - but I haven´t used that at all so can´t comment).

I say this as someone who had used AE since version 3.0 - once you go to a node based compositor (and yes it can be a challenging jump) you never ever ever go back to AE - ever. I still look at it from time to time and shudder over memories over hundreds of sub comps nested inside each other never knowing where that aliasing wasn´t turned on. Or the kiddy tracker. Or the horrible way rotos work.
If you have a RED and you do serious work with it have a look at Nuke. No don´t just have a look at Nuke do something with it that you would normally do in AE - overlook the awkwardness of the Node based Interface - you will get used to it faster then you think. A whole world of pain will go away that you never knew existed.

[jake blackstone]

No don´t just have a look at Nuke do something with it that you would normally do in AE - overlook the awkwardness of the Node based Interface - you will get used to it faster then you think. A whole world of pain will go away that you never knew existed.

Nodes are not great for editing and layers are awful for compositing. But you could use the software, that uses combination of nodes for procedural compositing and layers for editing- Smoke or Flame.
And once Lustre becomes part of Smoke, nothing is going to touch it. It took me a long time to get a handle on nodes (real nodes, not pseudo nodes, like in Resolve, where they really should have use layers, like the rest of all grading software). So, finally now I can really appreciate the power of node based compositor.

[Dave Blackham]

I completely agree with this statement. From Colorista to this. A Grading app is a grading app. A compositor is a compositor.

David

I agree too.

[Jeremy Neish]

I love AE too, but definitely hope the interface doesn't stay the same.

The small things they've done recently are good - EG little flowchart navigation thing above your comp window, search function for comps, more label color options.

More stuff would be appreciated, though!

The most glaring points in my mind:
- Interface for doing stereoscopic work is terrible (and I've done over a dozen theatrical stereo projects in AE so I know...) - at minimum, it needs to allow me to apply a filter to multiple views or a single eye only
<snip>


That's a great list of features, most of which I'd welcome, but for the most part not a fundamental UI change. I'll have to dust off my feature list request and post it shortly.

[Bruce Allen]

That's a great list of features, most of which I'd welcome, but for the most part not a fundamental UI change. I'll have to dust off my feature list request and post it shortly.

Let's agree on: there should be mild-to-substantial (but not fundamental) UI changes? I thought that you were arguing that AE should be set in stone, sorry.
I think that things like allowing folders or groups for layers, maybe offering a video track system instead of a one clip per layer system etc might be considered quite a bit of a change?


after effects "sophisticated compositing app" - I nearly spilled my tee.
You guys spending thousands of dollars on really good gear and lenses and all that and then you use after effects for compositing? srsly?
AE UI perfect - for compositing? Really not - you need to spit out the adobe pill thats been getting more and more sour over the last years (except with premiere maybe - but I haven´t used that at all so can´t comment).

I say this as someone who had used AE since version 3.0 - once you go to a node based compositor (and yes it can be a challenging jump) you never ever ever go back to AE - ever. I still look at it from time to time and shudder over memories over hundreds of sub comps nested inside each other never knowing where that aliasing wasn´t turned on. Or the kiddy tracker. Or the horrible way rotos work.
If you have a RED and you do serious work with it have a look at Nuke. No don´t just have a look at Nuke do something with it that you would normally do in AE - overlook the awkwardness of the Node based Interface - you will get used to it faster then you think. A whole world of pain will go away that you never knew existed.

Yeah, hate the tracker in AE, hate the roots in AE... love Nuke. My only issue with Nuke is: PRICE!

You have to either pay $9800 for Nuke plus Furnace (maybe you could get away with $4900 for Nuke plus $1700 for Sapphire?)... or $8000 for NukeX (with bundled FurnaceCore)... then the plugins are more expensive (Particular is $700 for Nuke instead of $400 for AE, Neat Video is $200 instead of $100, etc).

The price of After Effects is: $300 if you use Photoshop and Illustrator. Frikkin' dirt cheap, man.

And worst of all: Nuke has no Optical Flares plugin!!!! :sifone: Actually I think that's the major drawback :P It's coming though...

For companies like the one I work for, Nuke is just a little bit too much. Just with Maya, Cinema 4D, After Effects and the plugins we need, our software budget hits something like $20K per computer. Nuke just pushes things too much over the edge. Especially when you're paying for seats for interns...

So yeah, I think that After Effects will be around for a long time and I certainly do hope that they improve things.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

[Yohance Brown]

The thought that adobe would somehow combine AE and speed grade would could be awesome. That's just the out of the box thinking that could really shake up the vfx world and make an impact on color correct too.

I doubt adobe has the cahones to do it but it sure is a nice thought. Imagine an accessible node based vfx platform with the playback power of a DI system. No more of that crappy ram previews. That would be awesome.

But I'm sure reality will be much simpler like speed grade as a separate app that works well with premiere a la FCP and color. This isn't bad just not revolutionary.

[Rosario Balistreri]

There is a video on Adobe TV showing Speedgrade CS6 as a standalone application, and it's exactly the same of the previous one except for little changes ;)