What Should Adobe Do With Premiere Pro?
Wednesday, October 1, 2008 at 4:03PM 
Merge it with After Effects.
Why would I want to see one of my favorite applications bloat to encompass an program about which I am, at best, ambivalent? The answer lies with the post-production ruler of the roost, Autodesk’s “Advanced Systems,” AKA Flame, Smoke and Inferno.
“Do it in Flame” is the battle cry and of producers everywhere who want to get creative work done quickly and well, and leave with a finished product in their hand. “The Flame,” a term which colloquially encompasses Flame, Inferno, and to an increasing degree Smoke, has a reputation for interactive feedback, realtime operation, high quality, and seamless integration.
The interactive feedback comes from a combination of a dedicated disk array and hardware-accelerated compositing operations. “High quality” means up to 12 bits-per-channel color. Integration means that Flame can be used for onlining and mastering, interoperating with NLEs and other systems in the Autodesk family such as Smoke.
Flame has a great toolset. Many of its features are unique, or best-in-class. But many more of them are rather mundane and even behind the times. Still more of Flame’s features are simply odd, having developed within their own ecosystem instead of cross-pollinating with common entry points to digital compositing such as Photoshop and Shake. While a bit convoluted, Flame is a unique and accomplished tool that deserves its stellar reputation.
But some of the mystique that surrounds Flame is more perception than reality. Yes, you can play things back in real time—after you render them, a process which can sometimes be hardware accelerated, sometimes not, especially at high bit-depths. And those high bit-depths are not as high as the 16-bit integer color common to most inexpensive desktop solutions, such as After Effects and Fusion. Flame notoriously lacks pervasive floating-point color support, a feature ubiquitous at every level of compositing from Apple’s Motion to The Foundry’s Nuke. As integrated as a Flame might be into a facility’s post pipeline, that often simply means that it depends greatly on supporting players such as Avid, Smoke, or the kid in the back room with Photoshop, in order to appear as a complete solution to the client.
The other reason for Flame’s excellent reputation is that its high cost commands an equally high-value operator. The biggest perceived value of the flame is its speed and interactivity, but these qualities rest more on the artist’s shoulders than on the system itself. Flame and Smoke do need to render. Their many hardware-accelerated features do not often add up to to “real time.” Flame artists learn the same kind of client-management skills that colorists and offline editors master: They read the vibe in the room, tweak things when the attention is on them and disguise the subsequent rendering (which Autodesk brilliantly rebadges as “processing”) with well-timed chit-chat. “Where are you guys going to dinner tonight?” “Anyone want these Lakers tickets? I can’t use them. OK, here’s that new version…”
And once you render, you’ve got a new asset that you must decide to either build on destructively, which is tempting because of the speed but possibly disastrous if the client asks to dig back several layers for a change. Or you can work in “batch,” where you have the same kind of issues that every After Effects user faces, in that each tweak prompts a complete recalculation from square one. But for that price you maintain infinite flexibility. And incur the need for a render farm, which heavily-Flame-dependent shops do maintain, at great cost.
The inarguably great thing about Flame is that it is a responsive environment in which to be creative. While some VFX tasks require relentless hammering on a known set of assets (the domain of Shake and Nuke), some require more purely creative problem-solving. What should this effect look like? We need to add pizzaz! We really need something cool here and we didn’t shoot anything—what do you have lying around? Flame is a great tool to build, create, design, and experiment.
Does that sound familiar? It’s exactly what I love about After Effects.
After Effects is also a great creative environment. It’s got all kinds of fun tools and ways of making something out of nothing. It’s intuitive, especially for simple things, and plays nice with Photoshop and Illustrator. It wobbles under the pressure of high-end compositing, but it goes toe-to-toe with Flame for creative problem-solving.
What it lacks is Flame’s trademark interactivity. Not being able to enforce a specific graphics card, After Effects does very little with the GPU. Even on a system capable of realtime playback of, say, a 2K DPX sequence, After Effects requires you to RAM preview, and those RAM previews can be slow to build and fragile to view.
I recently visited an Orphanage artist who had temped together some effects shots for a feature film using After Effects. He had all the shots in one project, each shot a precomp conformed into one master comp that matched the cut from editorial. This is a very common thing to do in After Effects, something I do all the time: using the layered comp as an editorial timeline. It works, but it’s a hack. And in this case, it was a rather fruitless hack, as the guy’s machine didn’t have enough memory to hold a complete RAM preview of that lengthy comp. The artist had the right idea, to create a context in which to constantly check his animation, but it just didn’t work.
All day long he’s working in the individual shot precomps, at whatever resolution and quality settings he finds efficient. And every once in a while he wants to view his work in context. For that, he could be working compressed. He hardly needs uncompressed RGB for a quick little review of the cut. Instead, he tweaks one shot and returns to his timeline to find that he must re-render ten shots that he hasn’t touched. He might want to play with things editorially. For that as well, a true editorial timeline would be preferable to a stack of layers that aren’t really stacked.
That conform timeline should be NLE-style, with an implicit, user-selectable codec. The rendered previews should be cached to disk rather than held in RAM. In other words, that timeline should be Premiere Pro’s.
Adobe would suggest that you can do this now using Dynamic Link. You can indeed have a live connection between After Effects and Premiere. It’s a cool idea, but in practice it doesn’t work. It breaks when you do common things like iterate a project name. You wind up re-rendering in Premiere a lot, and when you do, you trigger expensive After Effects re-renders. Dynamic Link is an implementation of an obvious idea, not a bourne-of-need workflow enabler. You will only ever see it demoed with the very simplest of After Effects compositions, because with anything substantial, it becomes unbearable. As I’ve mentioned before, the only reason to use After Effects instead of cheaper, simpler options is to do something substantial.
We need seamless integration between the uncompressed, limitless-but-slow world of After Effects and the realtime environment of Premiere.
Rather than RAM preview an After Effects comp, you should process it to a clip, in the codec of your choosing. Every time you RAM preview you can either write over that clip or create a new one. A clip maintains a connection with the After Effects composition that created it, and knows if it is no longer current. It can display a little warning icon if changes have been made in the comp that have not yet been rendered.
Those clips are real media that you can use, re-use, edit with, and play back in realtime months later.
And they can be nested into a complex editorial timeline, where today they live as a DV temps and tomorrow they gets bumped up to uncompressed HD finals.
Because that codec of your choice could be anything from DV to uncompressed HD to 10-bit DPX.
The Premiere side of the equation would naturally adopt the complex but powerful color management features of After Effects. You’d be able to edit uncompressed DPX in a Premiere timeline and preview with a Kodak Vision 2383 film stock emulation. Heck, preview it with 2393, more commonly known as Kodak Vision Premiere!
This arrangement would let you work the way a Flame artist does, constantly able to weigh the benefits of power and speed. Just need to retouch a frame? Go ahead and paint on your last render. Need to dig back to the very bottom layer? Do so knowing that you can re-render everything above it and get the same results as before, plus the fix. And know that every time you process a clip and update it in your timeline, you’re building a realtime HD program that you can blast out to a client monitor, or a deck, or to Adobe Media Encoder. Combine this with speculative background rendering (ala Nucleo Pro), and you have a very powerful system. And this system would run just as well on a laptop as on an eight-core Mac Pro—the only difference would be the codec you’d chose.
Now maybe all of this doesn’t require the After Effects dogs and the Premiere cats to live together. Maybe Adobe doesn’t need to make the two programs into one. But there’s not a single After Effects user who couldn’t benefit from a realtime editorial timeline. Nor is there a single Premiere user who hasn’t wished for a feature that already exists in After Effects. In other words, whether After Effects and Premiere literally merge into one product SKU is not important—what is important is that, to someone with both applications installed, the option exists to use them together in such a way that the distinction between them blurs away completely.
If only there was some kind of application that existed specifically to “bridge” the Adobe Creative Suite apps together… Hey, what’s this thing taking up 400MB on my hard drive?
Maybe it’s through Bridge, maybe something else, but what we need is an Über Project that can contain both Premiere and After Effects assets and show how they are connected. I imagine it looking much like Flame’s “Desktop,” which is a sort of media home-base in Flame that serves as everything from a clip browser to a reference library to a convenient place to scratch your chin and ponder your next move. You wouldn’t be the only ones looking at this. Have you seen Eyeon’s Generation? Have you seen how much they’re charging for it?
However you do it Adobe, you gotta do it. Sure it will be hard, but only for reasons that would be wrong to base important decisions on. If you do it and do it right, you put a Flame in the lap of every one of your Production Premium customers. You can stop wasting precious development efforts (so much more precious now that your development cycles are shorter) duplicating functionality between your two flagship moving media applications. You’ll force Autodesk off their laurels and get them innovating and competing again. You’ll finally make it possible to host a client-supervised compositing/finishing session with Adobe software. You will put one and one together and the result will be three.
Visit the ProLost Amazon Store for After Effects CS4 or Adobe CS4 Production Premium and support ProLost.
UPDATE 2: Agree? Disagree? Visit the Adobe Feature Request form and make your voice heard. I hear a lot of people say that “Adobe doesn’t listen.” Well they can’t hear you if you don’t step up to the mic.
UPDATE: Some of the lovely reactions to this post on Twitter:
Reader Comments (64)
autodesk didn't make the retail price of both flame and smoke public, anyone got an idea how much those apps actually cost.. pls help
Generation looks expensive on paper, sure, but after the first $5000, it's only $700 for the viewer interface, and the licenses float on both. Compared to Flame, it's a bargain, and with Fusion you get the sweet blend of software and hardware that will run circles around a Flame. Having run Fusion on a 32GB 8-core machine with a 16TB DDN attached, I know you can crank out some zany fast comps. Having Generation provide a 4k realtime interface to ALL your disk caches from each comp will be a really nice way to get instant feedback on your progress and state.
Some say that this will not happen because compositing is one of many roles of AE. A small niche that Adobe will not cater to exclusively. However, I think a utility built into the software, a sort of post-render management tool, would do the trick. Not easy, but not gargantuan.
Funny how the Avid DS is not even on the radar for most people. It has all the editing power you need, plus node compositing and a fantastic paint tool! I also noticed the smoke screen shot too. I'll also agree with a previous poster about Autodesk development. In the short time I've been on smoke, I've seen three major releases with the most recent update happening at IBC.
Yeah DS never is on the radar. I once heard someone refer to it as Avid's big brother that grew up and went to college. You hear all this wonderful stuff about it, but you never really see it. Both DS and Smoke have dropped their price significantly in the past year. You can pick up either turnkey system for $50k-60k (right?). DS also offers a free 30 day trial if you want to tinker with it.
Thanks Stu for this great post! I think it reflects the thinking and frustration of many many AE users.
I was experimenting this frustation when I was attending a Quantel iQ system demo last year.
I saw that that system was not much powerful than After Effects in rendering terms. What made this system powerful was the render button that made a render in the background having the result stored on disk automatically. Having this renders on disk, you could access to the rendered comps and edit them like in premiere cause everything that was rendered could be accesed directly from a raid disk with realtime playback.
The intructor said me that all the system was propietary but I saw the Windows XP Start button in the second monitor. He refused to accept it was an XP machine... I know it have Quantel cards and Dylan Hard disks, but I dont think it would impact too much in comparisom to the nowadays desktop power.
I think that the difference with After Effects and these systems isnt hardware related really but software.
I wished Nucleo could give some light for this desperate situation but no luck, cause it works at half. It doesnt uses the disk caching for realtime playback as is supposed to work, like in the Quantel.
I understanded that the power of these high-end systems relies on the disk caching.
Why you have to render to RAM in AE when you have a RAID disk? And why not do it in background and with wathever you have to be able to have realtime playback of the sequence?
It seems like Adobe thinks the desktop computers work like 10 years before when they need to render to RAM or on a DDR to have realtime playback. Not anymore, but AE is stuck there with this poor RAM non wise caching.
Well, I wish Adobe think of that but seeing the little changes in CS4 makes me wonder changing to another solution cause I'm not waiting to version CS10 to have this very basic functionality that other software already have and make our lifes better and easier as compositors.
I'm a little bummed that you're ambivalent toward Premiere Pro. I just spent a ton of time getting to know the ropes with it. Why so negative about it? Why do use FCP? What's the difference? I want to learn the best NLE there is so I know I'm not wasting time. Is FCP the way to go?
Good post. I use both AE and flame. Two very different beasts and difficult to compare. Only one thing to say: in the end for me, every compositing software is trying to be a flame. And the tracker on AE really sucks.
Hi Stu
a couple of points...In flame its very easy to render down a section and bring it prerendered back into your batch as a form of manual caching so you don't have to re render depending where any change is made in the batch tree (ther is also an auto cache function). You certainly do not have to work destructively...that is an old school method.
In fact a great example of this and also of why the toolset beats anything hands down is doing a comp involving matte painting/projection/3d geometry. So i start from a plate I do a 3d track, i build my 3d geometry right there in flame (limited modelling toolset but extremely flexible with the right will!) using extended bicubics (sort of like NURBS), I then pipe all this into paint and do a matte painting, now i project this matte painting onto the scene i built. I do the full comp, full grade, effects etc. I now pipe all this straight into my timeline. Yes I hae to wait as it renders but then i get to see it immediately in context in the edit at 2k realtime. The director then asks me to go all the way back to the very beginning and maske a tweak...this is now ultra ultra easy and fast as it is all set up live and non destructively ready to go.
not only that my project is simple to manage and archive/restore and you never even have to see the os you just sit right there in the one app the whole time.
do this in after effects on the desktop which i have many times...and once you have done it in flame you just go crazy on the desktop with the constant repetition of the same steps everytime a minor tweak is made. So you will have for eg: a bojou project, a 3ds max project, a photoshop project, an after effects comp and a premier edit. each time you tweak anything at the beginning you have to go through all the steps again including reversioning and tracking the project data, rerendering multiple files into multiple directories for each stage of the project aswell as constantly having to browse around your hard disk through the painful windows explorer. Honestly its a real PIG and it tales time and sanity. Now you have a client who is working to the tightest of deadlines breathing down your neck and you will wish you were in the flame suite.
it now more or less supports half float...and close to full integration.
the innoation is really picking up and they are doing a great job at the moment. Object tracking is now in, auto stabilize, half float,etc
i'm not saying its perfect and there are many times i wish i had this tool or that tool available in Flame, but for the most part I always just relax alot when i know i'm doing a project on flame, i know i'll be getting it done on time to the clients approval.
cheers
paul
ps i thought i heard that yu guys at the orphanage now have Flame! is this true??
Photoshop might want to join the unified party
Ok, i also had dreamed about merging AEFX and premiere the first time i heard about the flame.
I would get your attention about a Dynamic-link with Maxon Cinema 4D.
Usually i tweak the 3d layer keyframes in C4D and then i export the 3D data in AEFX. Here i replace the nulls with my AEFX layer or comps.
Unfortunatly i can get no feedback, and the 3d enviroment of AEFX is not as the Flame one.
Now we also can import obj, so i hope that AEFX will improve the 3d integration.
I understand that merging Maxon with Adobe is more difficult that merging AEFX with Premiere, i would be happy just dreaming a Dinamic-link between the two software houses...
As guru you could develop this dream too.
Awesome Stu - I totally concur, but good luck getting Adobe to take anything like this serious. Unfortunately, it seems they're aiming to a lower common denominator these days. :/
Cheers, Jeff
I just stumbled upon this whilst searching for something else but it is a subject very dear to me, so I coluln't resist a comment. I remember going to a Flint suite with my bosses, way back in 1998, to be wowed by the post house who owned it into doing a job there. I came away thinking that it didn't really do anything I couldn't do in AE 3.1 [for this particular job], it just worked a little bit faster than my Pentium 166 could at the time. The boss let me do the job and everyone was happy with the results.
Soon after, I moved across to the newly acquired discreet paint* and effect* and eventually Combustion. I ended up working in a facility where I shared a room with a HAL and I pretty quickly realised that two things made the HAL worth three times as much per hour as my PC set-up. First was the fact that a promo producer knew exactly what could be achieved in a 4 hour HAL [or Paintbox] session and was 100% confident he/she could walk out of the room with a tape and walk down the hall to audio with finished vision. Second factor was that all the artists [HAL ran two shifts a day, 6 days a week] were amazingly good and knew how to get 100% out of every tool in their [limited] arsenal.
OTOH, booking a PC suite was almost a complete unknown to most producers and they had no confidence they could get the job done, even though I could often do work to a higher standard in less time than HAL. e.g. In HAL, artists had to hand-paint bevelled edges on text, which sometimes took an hour, where I could produce something that looked better in minutes in 3DS Max.
These days though, AfterFX has that level of intimacy within the industry, and PCs are much, much faster now, so one of those factors has been eliminated. The sticking point now is the variability of artists/operators. A good AE guy is worth his weight in saffron but most bosses don't see the value in paying that guy $120 an hour when they can get some pimply kid, fresh out of art college, for $20 an hour. i.e. It has now become a management issue, not a limitation of the equipment.
As for client attended sessions, AE still has some work to do. After a long time with Combustion and Toxik, the absolute worst thing about AE as an interactive tool is that every time you so much as think about touching the UI, playback stops. In Combustion, about the only thing you can do that interrupts caching/playback is to switch the view to a new output. As mentioned by someone else, Combustion's Edit Operator also addresses the main point of the blog. When it went into C3, I was very sceptical but it has become one of my most used tools over the years. Combustion is dead but there are still a few things that Adobe could copy that would make AE a far better product than it is today.
Hi, Stu:
At last it seems somebody heared you, but it wasn't adobe afterall.
Do you know HitFilm? I discovered a few minutes ago and instantly i remembered this post.
It's an editor AND compositor and it's very much "inspired" on adobe suite.