Adobe Creative Suite 5 is out today, and Red Giant Software has several of their most popular plug-ins available for upgrade to 64-bit today. Check Red Giant’s 64-bit FAQ here, and a compatibility chart here.

The day-one upgrades are: 

• Magic Bullet Colorista 1.1
• Magic Bullet Mojo 1.2
• Trapcode 3D Stroke 2.6
• Trapcode EchoSpace 1.1
• Trapcode Form 1.1
• Trapcode Horizon 1.1
• Tracpdoe Lux 1.1
• Trapcode Particular 2.1
• Trapcode Shine 1.6
• Trapcode Soundkeys 1.2
• Trapcode Starglow 1.6
• Trapcode Suite 10

With more on the way soon. I want to personally thank the amazing team at Red Giant for their hard work in getting these updates out.

If you’re looking to upgrade your Production Premium to CS5, I’ve created a convenient store page here. Looking to upgrade your Master Collection? That’s here. If you have some other permutation of Adobe CS5 needs, including student/teacher editions, you can get started here.

Update on Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 9:30AM by Stu

Yesterday Magic Bullet Looks joined the 64-bit party. The Red Giant compatibly page has been updated to include the following:

• Magic Bullet Looks 1.4
• Magic Bullet Quick Looks 1.3
• Magic Bullet Suite 2009.1

 

If you stopped me on the street and asked me what I find compelling about Adobe Creative Suite 5, here’s what I’d say:

64-bit is a big deal for After Effects users. It may well be the end of those show-stopping “could not create image buffer” errors which have for years been the embarrassment of After Effects artists trying to do high-end work.

Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill. Finally we have actual witchcraft in an Adobe application.

Roto Brush. While the Photoshop kids are trying to content-aware remove bikinis from celebrity photos, the After Effects crowd gets to play with the Roto Brush. Does it work as well as we see in the demos? Occasionally, yes. But even when it needs a little more massaging—such as when the foreground object is complex, and the background has similar colors and textures—the experience of using Roto Brush is not only speedier than traditional rotoscoping, it’s also considerably less maddening. Think of Roto Brush as making the work of roto faster and easier, not eliminating the work, and you’ll be in love.

Premiere Pro. It’s easy to get excited by the performance features in Premiere Pro CS5. The Mercury playback engine, native editing of HDSLR footage, etc. But the real news with Premiere Pro CS5 is that the term “Pro” is, at long last, appropriate. Premiere is now good. Real good.

Amazon has CS5 Production Premium available for pre-order now, with a ship date of June 30—but the actual ship date is much sooner. I’ve created a page on the ProLost store for the various CS5 upgrade options. Every time you buy from the ProLost store, I plant a tree made of puppies in front of the Unicorn factory in your name.

As the long-awaited 24p firmware update for the Canon 5D Mark II draws near, I joined Mike Seymour on episode 57 of the Red Centre podcast to talk about how excited I am that it marks the end of painful workarounds for the 5D’s no-man’s-land frame rate of 30.0 frames per second.

For as long as I’ve had my 5D Mark II, I’ve avoided using it for any projects that I could not shoot 30-for-24, i.e. slowing down the footage to 23.976 fps, using every frame. My 5D has been a gentle overcrank-only camera. There are plenty of occasions to shoot 30 frames for 24 frame playback—we do it all the time in commercials to give things a little “float,” or to “take the edge off” some motion. I still do this often with my 7D. Whatever frame rate I shoot—24, 30, 50 or 60, I play it back at 24. Just like film.

Folks ask me about 30p conversions often. Twixtor from RE:Vision Effects is a popular tool for this, as is Apple’s Compressor. Adobe After Effects has The Foundry’s well-regarded Kronos retiming technology built-in. All of these solutions are variations on optical flow algorithms, which track areas within the frame, try to identify segments of the image that are traveling discretely (you and I would call these “objects”), and interpolate new frames based on estimating the motion that happened between the existing ones.

This sounds impressive, and it is. Both The Foundry and RE:Vision Effects deservedly won Technical Achievement Academy Awards for their efforts in this area in 2007. And yet, as Mike and I discuss, this science is imperfect.

In August of 2009 I wrote:

I’m not saying that you won’t occasionally see results from 30-to-24p conversions that look good. The technology is amazing. But while it can work often, it will fail often. And that’s not a workflow. It’s finger-crossing.

On a more subtle note, I don’t think it’s acceptable that every frame of a film should be a computer’s best guess. The magic of filmmaking comes in part from capturing and revealing a narrow, selective slice of something resonant that happened in front of the lens. When you use these motion-interpolated frame rate conversions, you invite a clever computer algorithm to replace your artfully crafted sliver of reality with a best-guess. This artificiality accumulates to create a feeling of unphotographic plasticness.

Of course, it’s often much worse than a subtle sense that something’s not right. Quite often, stuff happens in between frames that no algorithm could ever guess. Here’s a sequence of consecutive 30p frames:

Right-click and select View Image to see full-resNothing fancy, just a guy running up some stairs. But his hand is moving fast enough that it looks quite different from one frame to the next.

Here’s that same motion, converted to 24p using The Foundry’s Kronos:

Right-click and select View Image to see full-resBlech.

Again, don’t get me wrong—these technologies are great, and can be extremely useful (seriously, how amazing is it that the rest of the frame looks as good as it does?). But they work best with a lot of hand-holding and artistry, rather than as unattended conversion processes.

(And they can take their sweet time to render too.)

I’m so glad we’re getting the real thing.

Ever since I’ve had a computer, I’ve had long render times. Whether it was ray-traced checkerboard spheres on my Amiga 1000 or The Last Birthday Card on my blue G3 tower, I’ve always managed to find ways to keep my computer busy while I’m off pursuing other hobbies, such as sleeping, long walks on the beach, or (most likely) staring at the screen chanting “faster, faster!”

On those rare occasions that I decide to leave the computer alone with its thoughts, I sometimes wish I had a way to check in on the render progress from afar. Adobe After Effects ships with a handy script called “Render and Email” that can send you a simple email to announce the completion of a render. If you have push email on your phone, or know how to send emails that arrive as text messages (here’s how), this can be a suave way to leave your render cooking with the confidence that you’ll know precisely when to return from your three martini lunch.

But that’s not quite the same as an actual visual confirmation of a successful render. In a world of iPhones, augmented reality, and non-fat yogurt that actually tastes good, we deserve more.

I recently figured out a couple of nifty ways to get remote, visual updates on my epic After Effects renders, thanks to the insanely useful and free service known as Dropbox, AKA What Apple’s iDisk Should Have Been. Dropbox is a directory on your hard drive that is constantly syncing in the background to a remote server. You can share subfolders with specific people or groups of people (whether they be on Mac, Windows, or Linux), and these folders truly are shared in the sense that anyone to whom you grant access can add, remove, or edit files therein. I use it to collaborate with other writers, with my post-production crews, and even to remotely add photos to the screen saver loop on my parent’s iMac.

Did I mention that all of this is free, for up to 2GB of storage?

Dropbox also offers a free iPhone client [iTunes link] that allows browsing your Dropbox folders and limited file viewing. Two of the file types that can be viewed on the iPhone screen are JPEG and Quicktime.

You can set up After Effects to render to your Dropbox, and view the results on your iPhone.

Of course, it’s not exactly that simple. There’s a limit to the size of file that can be viewed on the iPhone, and you wouldn’t want to be pulling 2K DPX files across AT&T’s network even if you could do something with them once you got them. So there are a couple of things you can do to streamline the process. Unfortunately it’s a bit of work to set up.

The simplest thing to do is to configure your Render Queue item to have two Output Modules: the one you were planning on rendering anyway, and a second one set up as a JPEG sequence with the “Stretch” option enabled to scale the images down to an iPhone-friendly size. It’s this second Output Module that you’ll render to your Dropbox folder. Every time a frame completes, an iPhone-optimized JPEG of it will be automatically uploaded to your secure Dropbox storage.

The result is that every time you open the Dropbox app on your iPhone, you not only see how many frames have been rendered, but you can visually flip through the frames themselves. Sweet!

Of course, what you can’t do is view the animation at speed, so that’s where the second option comes into play. You can create a third Output Module that writes out a small (not more than 480 pixels wide or 360 pixels tall) H.264 Quicktime movie.

Now you can both check your frames as they finish, and watch the end result at speed.

If you configure that Render and Email script and use it to launch your render, you’ll also have a push notification that the render is complete.

It’s not quite the same thing as full administering your render from your phone, but it’s still pretty cool.

Update on Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 1:59PM by Stu

Dropbox also has a general mobile-optimized site for users of other web-enabled phones: http://m.dropbox.com.

I used to show you weird crap like this all the time

Back in the day I blogged a lot about how compositing and rendering computer graphics in “linear light.” a color space in which pixel values equate to light intensities, can produce more realistic results, cure some artifacts, and eliminate the need for clever hacks to emulate natural phenomena. Along with Brendan Bolles, who worked with me at The Orphanage at the time, I created eLin, a system of plug-ins that allowed linear-light compositing in Adobe After Effects 6 (at the mild expense of your sanity). I also created macros for using the eLin color model in Shake and Fusion. Along the way I evangelized an end to the use of the term linear to describe images with a baked-in gamma correction.

Then Adobe released After Effects 7.0, which for the first time featured a 32-bit floating point mode, along with the beginnings of ICC color management, which could be used to semi-automate a linear-light workflow. The process was not exactly self-explanatory though, so I wrote a series of articles (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) on how one might go about it.

Then I rambled endlessly on fxguide about this, and in the processes managed to cast a geek spell on Mike Seymour and John Montgomery, who republished my articles on their fine site with my blessing.

This week Mike interviewed Håkan “MasterZap” Andersson of Mental Images about the state of linear workflows today on that same fxguide podcast.

Which is so very awesome, because I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

It’s just no fun going around telling people “Oh, so you put one layer over another in After Effects? Yeah, you’re doing it wrong.” Or “Oh, you launched your 3D application and rendered a teapot? Yeah, you’re totally doing it wrong.”

You are doing it wrong. And I spent a good few years trying to explain why. But now I don’t have to, because Mike and MasterZap had a great conversation about it, and nailed it, and despite the nice things they said about ProLost you should listen to their chat instead of reading my crusty old posts on the subject.

Because it has gotten much, much simpler since then.

For example, there’s Nuke. Nuke makes it hard to do anything but work in linear color space. Brings a tear to my eye.

And the color management stuff in After Effects has matured to the point that its nearly usable by mortal men.

Since I’ve seen a lot of recent traffic on those crusty old posts, here’s my linear-light swan song: a super brief update on how to do it in AE CS4:

In your Project Settings, select 32 bpc mode, choose sRGB as your color space, and check the Linearize Working Space option:


When importing video footage, use the Color Management tab in Interpret Footage > Main to assign a color profile of sRGB to your footage:


Composite your brains out (not pictured).

When rendering to a video-space file, use the Color Management tab in your Output Module Settings to convert to sRGB on render:

That’s the how. For the why, well, those crusty old articles could possibly help with that, especially this one on color correction in linear float, and this one on when not to use linear color space. Part 6 is still pretty much accurate in describing how to extract a linear HDR image from a single raw file using Adobe Camera Raw importer in After Effects, and this article covers the basics fairly well, although you should ignore all the specifics about the Cineon Emulation mode, which never should have existed. This little bit of evangelism is still a good read.

But the ultimate why answer is, and has been for a while now, within the pages of a book you should have anyway: Adobe After Effects CS4 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques (deep breath). Brendan Bolles guest-authored a chapter on linear light workflow, and not only does he explain it well, he gives many visual examples. And unlike me, Mark keeps his book up-to-date, so Brendan’s evergreen concepts are linked directly to the recent innovations in After Effects’s color manglement.

OK, that’s it. Let us never speak of this again.

Update on Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 2:09PM by Stu

I can’t believe I wrote all that without once linking to the official Adobe whitepaper on Color Managed workflows in Adobe After Effects CS4. It’s a great write-up, super detailed, and accurate in every way. Further proof that my work here is done.