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!

BulletProof

Sign up for the free public beta at redgiant.com.

RØDE smartLav

Perhaps one of the most controversial posts I’ve ever made here was Production Audio is Ripe for Revolution. I admitted that I’ve always found production audio confusing and asked gear makers to take my money in exchange for making my life easier.

It seems that RØDE Microphones was way ahead of me, as they have since announced two very interesting products, the iXY stereo microphone, and—of much greater interest to filmmakers—the smartLav lavaliere mic. Both attach to an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch and use the RØDE Rec iOS app.

Are we done? Not even close. There’s ample room for further innovation, but this is a great step. The terrific news is that now, with these hardware devices, RØDE can continue to develop the app and add new features, such as (who knows?) remote monitoring and control, integration with a slate app. And a shotgun model would be a welcome addition to this line.

No pricing or specific release dates (beyond “early 2013”) are available yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

Update on Sunday, February 3, 2013 at 8:37PM by Stu

Just after I posted this, RØDE tweeted:

The RØDE smartLav is $60US & will be available in March.

Me on 24p

For some reason I thought it would be a good time to repost this video interview I did with Rick young of MacVideo back in 2010. (Click on through if my wonky embed doesn’t work.)

See also: Movies at High Frame Rates