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Filed under: GentryMedia Sister Sites •ProVideo Coalition •NAB 2011 •

After Effects CS5.5 in Production

It’s only been a year since After Effects CS5 was released, which brought the application to 64-bit and introduced Rotobrush. With the announcement today of After Effects CS5.5 we are looking at the most rapid upgrade since Adobe unified all of its applications into one dancing,kicking line of graphical chorus girls known as the Creative Suite.

What did the After Effects team manage to accomplish in a year? Maybe that isn’t entirely a fair or accurate question, since there are often features that are in development, or even most finished, before a given development cycle begins. Nonetheless, for many artists version CS5.5 of After Effects may constitute more of a “must-have” than the previous couple of releases, if features alone are the gauge.

Smooth Camera Moves

The Hot New Thing of this release is probably Warp Stabilizer, which builds in camera stabilization based on automatic scene analysis. With the era of DSLR video has come the beautifully resolved, unusable shot - any given frame might look filmic in a shot that is overall so wobbly as to appear amateurish. Unless you’ve added equipment for the express purpose of stabilizing the camera, you can virtually guarantee that a handheld HDSLR video clip contains unwanted extra motion, because of the unbearable lightness and narrow pivot of that camera.

Warp Stabilizer is applied automatically - you do nothing - and requires somewhere between seconds and minutes (depending on clip length and motion complexity) to deliver a shot that, by default, preserves any camera ove while removing high frequency jitter and lower frequency wobble. It can seriously look like you had a dolly that day.

Alternatively, you can use it to lock off a shot completely, so if you were doing your best to hold the camera still doing that quick interview with Brian Wilson after running into him at a bar. Either Brian Wilson.

It’s not quite a black box, although the result can seem kind of magical, in that you just let it do its work and somehow the shot is smoother, without any visible data to tweak. There are no keyframes created by the automatic stabilization process, which is both uncomplicated and a little bit inflexible, if you have use for that stabilization data. More on that in a moment.

You do have leeway to tune the shot according to the amount of smoothness you want. The trade-off is generally that the smoother the shot, the greater the amount of scaling, unless the equally magical Synthesize Edges
effect works on your particular shot. This added effect will fill in the gaps around the borders with image data from adjacent frames. You can imagine that there are many cases in which it’s not suitable - for example that time you got to ride in the back of the squad car during a hot pursuit and pointed the camera out the passenger window while speeding across town at 80 miles an hour. With not enough data to compare, or too much variation in the background, there’s not enough to be synthesized, and even with less extreme situations, you wouldn’t necessarily mistake the filled-in areas for the source. But sometimes it’s a complete gift.

If there’s a flaw to Warp Stabilizer, and this is certainly not a fatal one, it’s that there is no usable motion data generated by the effect. It’s more like someone made you a whole new shot; there’s no potential to, say, lock off the moving image, composite in a bunch of static layers and reapply the motion.

Also, it’s still necessary to hold the camera steady enough to avoid excessive scaling or, worst of all, motion blur. Here the magic hits its limits; one day a set of smart algorithms will no doubt be released to guess how an image should look without blur, but for now that tool is not known publicly to exist (if you know otherwise, and won’t be fired from a research lab for saying so, by all means share that please).

Finally, although there are settings in the effect to reduce the “jello cam” look of rolling shutter artifacts, results will sometimes look wobbly with Subspace Warp - the option that actually changes pixel data - in an odd enough way that you just don’t want

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3D tools have to be a D, sorry.

How many AE users are doing stereo 3D projects?

Of those… how many people DO NOT use stereo footage or stereo 3D renders? EG do everything with the After Effects camera? This is a tiny minority within a minority.

What we need is the same thing I asked for in CS5 and has been in Nuke for ages: Support for actual stereo footage.

The ONLY reason we haven’t all moved to Nuke is that it lacks some more motion-graphics oriented features.

The funny thing is: at this rate, The Foundry is going to add the 25 things Nuke needs to become a great motion graphics tool, before Adobe adds the 1 thing After Effects needs to get a passing grade with stereo projects.

Bruce Allen

Posted by Bruce Allen  on  04/11  at  01:04 AM

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Interestingly, the stuff Adobe is most excited about (at least the stuff they seem to be leading with) is the stuff I’m least interested in.

To me, the camera blur and lighting stuff are the real draw. Stabilization is nice but there are other tools I’ve been using for this (which also help with Rolling Shutter) so that isn’t a headliner to me. 3D is both underwhelming here and not something I think of AE for (yet I guess).

But being able to have real light behaviors and camera blur will really take things to another level. I see uses for this in MoGraph AND compositing.

Some ‘smaller’ features are also potentially really nice. Saving as CS5 (slight backward compatibility) is REALLY nice and I hope they find a way to continue this going forward.

“Edit this Look at That” is nice as well. I’ve used AE this way for ages, but nice to have it be a bit easier to set up. Now if only they could get the interactivity to “ripple” thru comps (real-time updating when working inside comps).

Timecode enhancements are nice, will see how useful it is. Expression enhancements always welcome. Enhanced caching looks great - speed is always nice to gain.

AND AUDITION!!! I don’t do audio work all that often, but when I do, it will be nice to have a proper app again (RIP Soundbooth!)

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  04/11  at  09:44 AM

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