Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[CS6]
[Steven Ford:] My name is Steve Ford. I'm the senior product manager for Adobe After Effects.
In this video we're going to look at what's new in After Effects CS6.
I've been around After Effects for a long time, and this is probably the biggest release
in about 10 years--at least that's what beta users are saying
The first thing I want to show you is, as you can see, this is a very typical After Effects comp,
and the layers span the entire time line.
That's normal--I've seen many compositions like this.
You'll notice it's getting 2.5-3.4 frames per second.
That's just very typical for After Effects.
The whole point, though, is in this case with the global performance cache,
we have something new.
If I just scroll down here, and I show you the cache indicators, you can see that there's a lot of RAM
for each layer now as well as the frame.
When I do something simple--if I just change the quality of an effect--you'll notice that,
as After Effects has always done, the frame cache is gone.
Because my layers span the entire time line, normally what After Effects would have to do
at that point is go back to rendering each frame one-by-one back to 2.41 frames per second and so forth.
But now when I do a spacebar preview, essentially what happens is I'm getting in this case
12, 13, and even up to real time in terms of performance.
That's because we're only rendering what we absolutely have to.
That's the whole motto of the global performance cache--reuse, recycle, repurpose--
only render what you absolutely need to and then go from there.
That's the biggest change, but we wanted to really kind of take this also a step further.
We wanted to focus on the fact that many users use multiple projects at the same time.
As an example, I may quit this project and then switch over to another one
or I might just quit After Effects entirely.
The point is I'm not even going to save the project.
I'm going to close it, and then I'm going to open it again.
The point is that we keep the disk cache around for as long as your drive will hold it.
In other words, if you've got the space associated with the project,
then what will happen is that we will go back and use that disk cache wherever it may be.
As an example, you'll see I have nice, green RAM and blue disk cache,
in terms of my layers and on the frame.
When I hit spacebar play in this case, I'm basically getting
real-time performance right out of the gate.
Now this could've happened to a project that I was working on yesterday.
The whole point is that we're trying to make sure that your workstation is getting out of the way,
that you're going back to the exact place in the project that you were the last time you looked at it,
and you don't have to wait to see what you last worked on.
Those are the two primary areas of the global performance cache.
The last instance is we've also changed entirely how it renders in the background.
In this case, what I want to do is I'm going to actually show you
where the global performance cache is.
As I go through that--again, it's found in your preferences
and you can choose where you put your disk cache. I highly recommend high-performance disks.
In this case, I've got Intel solid-state drives,
and they're giving me as fast a read and write as possible that the disk cache can use.
If I just empty that--I'm going to get rid of it, and them I'm going to start again,
because we've also added another thing into the global performance cache,
as I just get rid of my memory here,
that will show you that we can do this in the background.
The whole point is that if I hit control return you'll notice that
background cache comp '03 is running in the background.
What will happen is that I can continue to go to work,
but you'll notice that my nice blue cache line here is filling in as I work,
meaning that when I want to see what I'm working on I can just go and preview it.
I don't have to wait for the machine to actually render anything.
I can just hit the spacebar preview, and it'll go from there,
and I'm getting real time performance out of the gate.
Again, this is the global performance cache, and it's focused on an area where
After Effects users preview almost as much as they breath.
We wanted to redo the architecture and make that so that you have
a seemless experience and the hardware is getting out of the way.
You can look at what you're doing faster, like you've never been able to do before.
The next feature I want to show you is something that we're really excited about.
It's called the 3D camera tracker.
In CS5.5 we introduced a thing called the warp stabilizer.
That was met with a fantastic response.
What the warp stabilizer did was put a 3D point cloud over the top of 2D footage
and used that 3D point cloud to basically stabilize the footage,
making it look like it was shot with a dolly or a steady cam.
We wanted to take that to a different level.
We wanted to use the same technology but use it for applying camera track,
because those that 3D point cloud that gets assigned to the 2D footage can come in
really handy in determining what is a 3D object in the space of the 2D footage.
As an example, much like in the warp stabilizer, I'm going to take this footage here.
Instead of saying warp stabilizer, I'm going to say track camera.
You're going to see the familiar blue bar that comes up with the warp stabilizer.
Again, what that's doing is in the background it's going to analyze the footage
and assign the 3D point cloud.
As you can see, we've got track points now that have been assigned to the footage,
and as I scroll through the footage, you can see those track points change
and move on 3D planes.
I'll bring my target size down here.
You can get the idea of how we've been able to understand different planes
that I can then, say, track objects to.
As an example, I could just choose these 3 objects and move my target up.
And if I wanted to put some text, I can assign that text there,
and I'll move it over, and since this is Boneshaker, I'll call it "Boneshaker."
The point is that I can, in a really simple fashion, use these 3D track points,
and as I move through the footage, the text is tracking, scaling, autopositioning,
in terms of where it should be.
In fact, I've even got it shaking along with the footage.
The whole point is that I've set this up in a matter of seconds.
The other thing--I'll go into a little bit more detail, and I'll show you another composition here.
From this perspective, I'll apply the same thing, and I'll track the camera.
Just to give you an idea, although this is some pretty interesting footage.
It's actually David Simon's desk--the guy who invented After Effects.
But one of the things that I wanted to show you is this shot
is really good for demonstrating how we can actually shape the planes around an object in 3D space.
The point is that you can really have a good understanding of the different planes
that are available to you and then track something to it.
As an example, say I want to--well, I'm going to get right of this picture,
because that's Dave's family, not mine.
I'm going to just change that, and in this case, I'll just put a solid over top, so you get the idea.
As I transfer it--and I'll just change its orientation a little bit--
you'll see that I'll get a very good track with basically no effort, as an example.
Then, obviously, I could put my own photo and go from there.
As I play that, I'm getting a really good track that works in 3D space over top of 2D footage.
Now, the obvious thing you might notice is that it went over the unicorn's horn here.
While it's not truly in 3D space, because again this is 2D footage.
This is where something really handy that we shipped with CS5 comes in,
and that's the rotobrush.
As an example, what I'll do is take that same footage, and I'll put it on top of the comp.
Then I'll open it up and use the rotobrush just to, say, take out this horn of the unicorn.
And you'll get the idea.
Again, this is very quick, but if I propagate that our and let the rotobrush do its thing
and then come back, what I'll get is a nice occluded effect with little effort in terms of
how this actually propagates the scene.
As an example, you can see that it brought over the unicorn's horn,
and it can go in behind the monkey quite nicely.
The 3D camera tracker has lots of options in terms of variability.
As an example, I can go in, and I can give more context to how the scene was shot.
The more context I can give it, the better understanding the camera tracker will have.
What we're trying to do is get to as low an error as possible.
In this case, we're getting about 0.73 pixels.
The point is that this can really accurately track complex scenes
and be able to deal with things like parallax and so forth
and allow you to put something into a scene with very little effort.
The other nice thing about the 3D camera tracker is all this information is in the camera.
As an example, if I click on my 3D camera here,
you'll notice that I've got all the track points key framed.
I've got all this information about the track.
I can then take that and put it into a different application.
As an example, if you work with tools like Cinema 4D or 3D Studio Max.
You can take this information that is all associated with the camera,
and via their interoperability plugins you can take that information
into your model in either one of those programs.
That was the 3D camera tracker.
The next feature I want to show you is something we've actually been working on for 2 years.
We've heard from a lot of users that they use After Effects in conjunction
with 3D modeling programs such as Cinema 4D or 3D Studio Max.
What we wanted to focus on was the ability to take after effects from
its traditional 2.5D 3D space and bring it into full 3D geometry within After Effects.
To do that, though, we had to lay some foundation.
We put a full ray tracer using the optics toolkit with Nvidia.
The Nvidia folks really helped us optimize this ray tracer for Nvidia graphics cards.
Now, let me set the record straight.
You can use this ray tracer on any workstation.
You don't need an Nvidia graphics car, but if you happen to have an Nvidia graphics card,
it will work and provide performance that you have never seen in a 3D program before.
That being said, we wanted to focus on something that motion graphics artists
we saw doing in After Effects projects were doing all the time.
That was they would put stacking layers, lots of layers behind each other
just to try to get a simple extruded effect.
Now, After Effects is not going to be a modeler, but what it is going to be able to do
is allow you to do simple extrusion and add some really cool material options
to things like text layers and shape layers.
What this also does is lay a great foundation for the future that one day we can get to
interoperability of real 3D geometry between After Effects
and the applications it's used most commonly with.
First, what I want to show you is something that we actually focused on
within our own suite within Production Premium,
and that is really tight integration with Adobe Illustrator.
As an example, I'm going to take this Illustrator file, and I'm going to drop it onto my comp.
Now, one of the things After Effects users have been asking us to do for a long time
is to really take this Illustrator file and just simply convert it into a shape layer.
What happens in this case, and I'm just going to change this because of my lighting,
the whole point is that I've now kept the integrity of the Illustrator file.
I've got all of the layer groupings and so forth and the structure of the Illustrator file
as a native shape within After Effects.
In this case, I can actually just delete the Illustrator file completely and work with the native shape.
Now what's going to happen is that I'm going to change this shape layer into 3D space.
If I open up my layers here, you'll see the traditional options with the shape layer within After Effects,
but as I turn that into 3D space, you'll notice a couple of new options--
geometry and material, and this means that I've got my composition,
and you can see up here it's set in to be the render of ray-traced 3D.
As you create new compositions, and you go to your advance tab,
you'll notice you have the option now of classic 3D,
which used to be called advanced 3D in previous versions of After Effects,
or ray-traced 3D.
This means that you're basically using the optics toolkit, and you're going to be shooting
real rays at objects following the laws of light and going from there.
You can change the options in this--ray-tracing quality and so forth.
Again, your performance will go through the roof if you have
the optimal Quadro cards and so forth from Nvidia,
but it will work on any workstation falling back to the CPU if you don't have an Nvidia graphics card.
As an example, what I'll so with this is we've also built a draft renderer.
If we're shooting real rays using a ray tracer within After Effects, we also want to be able
to work in a draft mode to have fast interactivity.
That's using your GPU, and it works on any GPU.
It's not limited to just Nvidia.
In this case, if I want to just add some simple extrusion to this layer,
you'll notice I can do so, and it's very simple to add that.
We've made a lot of improvements to the bounding box in terms of how you navigate 3D space,
but in this case, it's very simple to add
slight extrusion and add some good materials options and create a cool effect.
In this case, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to bring this back to zero,
because what I'm going to do is I'm going to create the Hot Wheels logo
very quickly to give you the idea.
As an example, I'm going to change where this is oriented in 3D space,
and I'm just going to bring this out from that side.
I'm also going to bring in the other elements that are part of the Hot Wheels logo,
and I'm going to convert those into shape layers as well.
As I do that and convert this into 3D space,
I'll bring this out a little bit as well.
Then I'll bring in the last part, which is the white behind the logo.
As I convert this Illustrator file into a shape layer, what I can then do--
again, getting right of the Illustrator file completely--
I can take all three and then just make sure and add a simple extrusion,
and then what I'll do is reorient them back into 3D space,
so that they're in the right position.
In this case, I've added simple extrusion to a logo
without having to really do much or just out to a 3D application.
Now, again, we don't expect After Effects to ever be a modeler.
You can do some amazing things in a 3D modeling application
in terms of extrusion and so forth.
What the point of this is that you can do simple stuff.
You can add really cool materials options,
and it's just as I move this over a bit and get it oriented correctly in the background.
You'll get the idea as I bring over the letters finally as well and bring this in.
Again, you can see how simple it is to work with objects in 3D space.
I'm using the draft renderer, which makes my interactivity nice and easy.
Then, if I decide to just add some simple materials to this--
I'll select all my layers and then I'll change over to the materials options
I'm going to turn on some shadows.
I'm going to give it a little bit of reflection
and something I like is just to make it look like glass from that side.
Again, you can do some really amazing things in terms of the quality of the image,
but the point is that I can do this really simply, and you'll get the idea
as I switch from my draft renderer and now using the GPU into the real ray tracer.
You can start to see that I've got some good reflections.
The image itself is pretty good to what I want in terms of shadows and so forth,
but what I can also do is I can take that over, go into my options,
and then change the number of rays that I shoot at it
just so I can decide what it's going to look like for my final output and go from there.
Again, adding things like motion blur, depth of field, and so forth.
These are all things that people who have been working in 3D modelers
have had to deal with for quite some time.
After Effects is utilizing every resource in your workstation
as much as possible--your GPU, your CPU's RAM and disk.
From this perspective I have a Quadro 5000 in this workstation.
As you can see, it's starting to give me a really good image, and the performance is really good.
As an example, if I bring this up to 100%, you can get the idea
that I can create a good image using shape layers and text layers
with After Effects and utilizing my GPU to its full extent.
Overall these are just a few of the features found in After Effects CS6.
We've been working on this for a long time, so we're really excited to see
what this will do for your workflow.
The general theme for After Effects CS6 is performance,
so we're trying to get the workstation out of your way so that you can see
on the screen what's in your head faster.
Again, my name is Steve Forde. I'm the senior product manager for Adobe After Effects.
Thanks for watching.
[http://tv.adobe.com/]
