After Effects Next

Adobe has revealed the new features they’ll be showing off at NAB. Here’s some of what’s new in After Effects:

• Cinema 4D Lite and live 3D pipeline between Cinema 4D and After Effects
• The Refine Edge tool, which adds crazy good soft edge matting to the already amazing Roto Brush.
• Snapping. This doesn’t sound big, but it actually is. Make a cube in seconds rather than minutes.
• Bicubic resampling. Ahem. Finally.

Read more here. And here’s a good rundown of what’s new in Premiere—looks like they focused on solid usability features rather than glitz, which is great to see.

Now, back to After Effects. Cinema 4D Lite will be bundled with this “next” version, and you’ll be able to create a C4D scene right from within AE. You create the 3D animation in C4D, but you can change your view on the scene using the AE camera. Then, when you render your After Effects project, the C4D scene is rendered on-the-fly. This is not just a welcome simplification of the standard render-import-render workflow, it puts powerful 3D features into any After Effects session. Pretty cool.

Creative Cloud subscribers will get these new features as soon as they are released, which, I suspect, will create a lot of warm, fuzzy feelings about the whole software-as-a-subscription model.

A big, personal congrats to my friends on the After Effects team. Nice work all!

Newton2

The dream is alive. If you don’t hear from me for a while, at least you’ll know why.

Newton2, which now features joints, springs, and convex hulls, is available for $249.99 at aescripts.com.

Race Around the Track: 20 Years of After Effects

Adobe After Effects is celebrating its 20 year anniversary. I’ve only been using it for 17 of those years, but I’m pretty sure I’ve packed about 100 years of use into that time.

After Effects is my go-to creative tool for almost everything I do, from designing the user interface of Magic Bullet Looks 1.0, to crafting visuals for my films, to creating my Christmas cards. I was delighted to be able to sit down with Adobe’s Michelle Gallina and tell the story of how I came to meet this creative partner that I’ve relied on almost every day since.

The story I didn’t tell is how happy I am to have become friends with so many members of the team that makes After Effects. A heartfelt congrats to the amazing team of Daves and Non-Daves at the plabt. Here’s to another 20 years of me giving you a hard time.

Adobe Anywhere

Back in May I wrote:

The “big iron” days are over. Simplicity is the new powerful. Fast is the new good. The computer is the new hardest working guy in the room. Except it’s no longer in the room.

Looks like Adobe agrees:

Promising!

Update on Wednesday, September 5, 2012 at 12:25PM by Stu

The press release lists After Effects among the supported apps.