Category Archive: Production Tools
Jun
04
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May
20
After Effects CS5 for 64-bit only–a good thing?
I nearly missed this one by Andrew Kramer–
Not fresh news but After Effects CS5 will be shipping as a 64-bit only application which requires a 64 bit operating system.
Now, for a very long time, I didn’t even take advantage of my 64-bit system. I chose to install the 32-bit version, just because of compatibility fears (which turned out to be unfounded). I just recently did a clean install of Windows 7 and decided to take the plunge (and full advantage of all 4 GB of RAM), and I don’t regret it for a moment. I’m serious about using After Effects and using it right, and always being ready to upgrade… but this just goes to show that everyone has moments of trepidation. Come on people, we can do this! 
Kramer goes on to say…
As a note, the requirements for running 64 bit are not very steep, but if you do build out your machine, it will be able to take advantage of the extra power. No word on Adobe System requirements yet…
After “Smell Memory” wraps, it’s time to install that CS5 upgrade and dive into it! I can barely wait, and I’ll be writing all about it here. Still psyched for Roto-Brush as well. Amazing implications for machinima postproduction.
May
19
Rotoscope with ease using After Effects CS5?
I feel like in so many ways, we launched this project at just the right time. Machinima.com traffic has tripled in the past few months. Searches for machinima are way up, and most exciting for me, we’re about to see a new release of the Adobe Creative Suite Production. These are the ultimate post-production tools in my experience, and After Effects is easily my favorite program of all time.
Now if you know anything about me, rotoscoping is something I both despise and yet can’t live without. Every serious motion graphics editor has to deal with it at some point or another, and nearly every project requires at least some rotoscoping.
Yesterday while working on “Smell Memory” I came up with a pretty cool trick (in Second Life) that helped avert the need for rotoscoping in a certain depth-of-field shot. In fact, if we’re lucky, we may make it through the film without any rotoscoping at all, but I’m not counting on it… (By the way, I will post a tutorial comparing rotoscoping with some cool other methods I’ve found for SL machinima… and in that video, I’ll do my best to explain rotoscoping for the perplexed!)
Once we finish this next film, I’ll for sure be diving straight into CS5. (For now, I’m still working with CS4) I’m excited about After Effects CS5 being 64-bit native and several other new features, but what really does it for me is a new tool called Roto-Brush. As Michael Coleman wrote on the Adobe blog:
After Effects CS5 introduces a revolutionary new tool called the Roto Brush that will dramatically reduce the time you spend creating mattes for objects in your video. Revolutionary is a big word, but it fits. The Roto Brush borders on magic.
Instead of tediously drawing masks at the edges of your objects and painstakingly animating them, you make quick, gestural strokes to define foreground and background areas. Then After Effects does the hard part for you. It finds the edges and creates the transparency for you. It’s perfect for those jobs where you don’t have a green screen or consistent background.
Life-changing indeed! Does this mean that a whole generation of animators may never have to deal with the tedious frame-by-frame hell that we once knew rotoscoping to be? Here’s hoping! Can’t wait to try it.
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