Cutting Through the Cloud

Aharon Rabinowitz posted a wonderful breakdown of why you’re both right and wrong to be bent out of shape by Adobe’s announcement that most of their flagship software will go subscription-only.

Adobe is a company that makes tools we all love and rely on for our work in video post production. But with their latest announcement – that from here on in, all software will only be available through subscription – a lot of people are upset and feeling betrayed. I want to try to address it all in a balanced way. I’ll ask that you read all the way through because I am going to start with why, about certain things, you’re totally wrong. Then, I’ll move into why you’re also totally right – and have the right to feel angry and demand more.

Aharon’s words stick out like a sore thumb on the internet, because they’re rational, well-considered, researched, and nuanced. Creative Cloud is neither a money grubbing conspiracy designed to seize power, nor is it a deftly-handled modernization of a business model. The truth is somewhere in between, and Aharon has done us all a favor by taking the time to analyze the situation.

And the part about the ruler/stylus guy is priceless.

Adobe fans and haters alike, read it. Adobe employees, print it out and tape it to your wall.

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.