Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[CS6]
Hi. I'm Jason Levine, Principal Worldwide Evangelist
for Adobe's Video and Audio Tools,
and today I'm going to talk to you about some of the new features in After Effects CS6.
There's been a lot done to really improve the performance
and experience inside the application.
The first feature that really deals directly with that that is a true 64-bit performance revolution
is something called the Global Performance Cache.
Global Performance Cache is actually made up of 3 separate elements:
a global RAM cache, a persistent disk cache, and a new graphics pipeline.
But basically what it does is that it allows you to reuse previously cached frames
without having to re-render.
So if we take a look at the Composition panel that we have down here,
you'll see that we have the familiar green line.
If I go ahead and RAM preview this, you can see what this looks like.
And again, it's playing in real time.
If I wanted to make a change to something like the Levels effect that we have set here,
I could come in here and just grab the midtones and make an adjustment,
and then of course the green line goes away.
So I would begin to re-RAM preview this.
Previously, it would have to re-preview and re-cache all of the frames
for all of the effects that have been applied,
but now with Global Performance Cache it's only re-caching new frames
for anything that was changed.
So for instance, it's only re-caching the frames on that Levels effect, not everything else,
which allows me to work that much more quickly.
And you can see already we're back to real-time preview.
If I don't like that, I can undo it.
And again, previously, we'd have to re-cache and re-preview everything else again.
Now when I undo I still have my green bar
because it's pulling those same cached frames from RAM.
No waiting around, no messing about.
It's just there allowing me to truly work as fast as I can think.
Even cooler, what happens if I actually exit this project? Let's go ahead and do that.
I'm going to close the project here.
Let's go ahead and purge all memory and reopen it,
because this is now going to showcase the Persistent Disk Cache option that we have.
So you'll notice now inside the Composition panel we have a blue line.
This is indicating that these frames have been located on disk.
So now when I hit the space bar it's pulling those from disk,
putting them into RAM, allowing me to again play this back that much more quickly
without having to wait for everything to re-render over and over again.
It's truly a performance revolution, and it really changes the way you work
inside the application.
The other element of this of course is the newer graphics pipeline.
Essentially what this does, it's just better harnessing the OpenGL on your graphics card
for faster interactivity, more responsiveness
especially when dealing with things like layers with graphical overlays,
things that have bounding boxes or masks or motion tracker points,
even interactions like making brush size adjustments.
These are all accelerated, and it's really going to just change the way you work
inside of After Effects.
In the previous version of After Effects, we introduced some new features dealing with 3D.
In CS6 we now have a new 3D camera tracker
which will automatically analyze motion present in 2D footage
and automatically create a 3D camera and overlay 3D tracking points
right on top of your 2D footage with a simple right click operation.
So if you take a look at the piece that we have here,
once again you'll see our Global Performance Cache hard at work here
with our blue and green line combination here.
What I would like to do is actually parent something like some text or an object
or a banner to the top of that car.
To do that previously was a fairly long, fairly painful process,
especially if you actually wanted to create true-looking 3D motion
where it grows over time and maintains that perspective.
Now it's very, very easy inside of CS6.
I can take this DPX sequence that we have here, I can right click
and I can choose to Track Camera.
And much like several other processes in After Effects CS6,
this is a background process.
It's analyzing in the background, which of course means that I could go
to other compositions or other applications and keep working
and it's going to keep processing,
all in an effort to really optimize and speed up the workflow
when you're working in After Effects CS6.
Once the analysis is done, what we're going to end up with
are a series of 3D tracker points on top of the footage, which we can see here.
So if I go ahead and play this back--
let's go ahead and select the Camera Tracker effect here--
now you can see all of these points actually on the car.
Now we have the ability to choose a series of points
that really represent the plane that we want to parent our object or text to.
I can come over here, and you'll notice that as I move my cursor around you get this little target.
We can adjust the target size, so let's shrink this down to around 23.
I can either have it select points for me
or I can manually choose a series of points like this one here,
this one here, and this one here.
And that actually looks to be in pretty much the right perspective.
So I can right click on this now where I have the option to Create Text and Camera,
Create Solid and Camera, Null and Camera.
I'm going to choose Text, go ahead and select my text,
modify the text.
Let's go ahead and scale this down.
And we'll just slightly modify our X rotation like this,
scale it down a little bit more like that.
And now you can see, as I move through, it's attached to the hood of the car,
it's maintaining perspective.
And take a look at the final version.
Again, this is a process that previously took a lot of time to do
and a lot of time to make it look good, to make it look convincing.
Now with the new 3D camera tracker it's a simple right click operation,
tracks the motion on your 2D footage, creates 3D tracker points,
creates the camera, and allows you to create something that looks very realistic
very, very quickly.
The next thing that I want to cover deals with Illustrator integration,
and it's long been a process when working with Illustrator files within After Effects
that you had to go back to Illustrator to make even basic changes,
things like fill and stroke width.
Now you can do this all inside of After Effects without ever leaving the app.
You'll see here that I have this basic Hot Wheels logo here.
If I right click on my AI file, I'm going to choose to Create Shapes From Vector Layer.
So once I do that, now when you look up inside here
you'll see that we have the ability to modify the fill.
We can modify the fill if we want. Just go ahead and cancel out of that.
We can modify the stroke, we can modify the stroke width.
Okay, that's all cool, but you'll notice when I grab that, what do we now see?
Oh. Anchor points.
You can actually grab the vertices now and modify this Illustrator file
directly inside of After Effects without even going to Illustrator.
This is cool and an incredible time-saver
and again just allows you to work in a way that you're very familiar with,
but you can now do all of this directly inside of After Effects.
The next thing that I'm going to talk about is working with extruded text and shapes,
and we're going to use this same basic example here to cover that.
Once again we have this Illustrator file here.
I'm going to twirl this down, and we're going to turn on 3D here.
Let's go into some of our Transform options,
and we're just going to modify the X rotation.
You can see now if we also scroll down that I've got a camera and some lights applied here.
So as I modify the X and Y, you can see that it's being modified by the lights that are applied.
Something like this.
Now we can go down to our Geometry options and twirl this down,
and we can add something like a bevel so we can begin to actually extrude this text.
Let's go down to something like Concave.
Let's increase our bevel depth something like that,
increase the extrusion depth.
What's also cool about this, you'll notice that if I come over here to the stroke width
it's still editable.
So incredible power, incredible flexibility here, but here's the coolest thing.
We have something new called the Ray-Traced 3D Render Engine.
If you're familiar with using the previous Scanline Render Engine,
you had a lot of flexibility there,
but if you want to create truly photorealistic soft shadows
and great depth of field blur, better light transmission,
you're going to use this new 3D Ray-Traced option.
I can come down to my previews here.
I'm going to turn off the Fast Draft preview.
Now we are truly using the Ray-Traced 3D Renderer.
I'm going to twirl down material options where I can add things like transparency
really to recreate something that looks very cool, very new, very exciting.
If I come over to our final version here just to give you an idea,
using that same piece of footage let's do once again a quick RAM preview on this.
Now you'll actually see that that same Hot Wheels logo has transparency.
You can see that the light is bleeding through there beautifully,
we have all these reflections, and this is all truly taking advantage
of that 3D Ray-Traced Rendering Engine. Very, very cool.
All right, moving on. So, rolling shutter.
In the previous version of After Effects, we introduced the Warp Stabilizer effect,
which is ideal for working with DSLR or any kind of handheld footage
to create the effect of it having been shot on a dolly or a track just to stabilize,
and we introduced rolling shutter repair.
Rolling shutter artifacts are a common problem of working with DSLRs.
Now we have a standalone Rolling Shutter effect inside of After Effects
that is literally just like its predecessor.
Drag and drop and it works very quickly.
So if you take a look at the footage here, what you'll see is that on this car that we have here,
as the camera was panning across the back of this car--
you can really see it on the Hot Wheels license plate--
it just appears, well, bent.
If I kind of drag and scrub over here,
you can really see that this right here just looks skewed.
It shouldn't look like that. It should look straight.
So again, making it very easy for you, I can go to Effects & Presets,
Rolling Shutter, drag and drop right on our footage,
go into our Effects controls here, readjust our rolling shutter rate--
let's just take this to around 62%.
You've got options here for scan direction, different methods.
So here is the before, a little skewed. Here is the after, repaired.
And what you'll see again very quickly is that we took that footage
that previously suffered from rolling shutter artifacts
and fixed it with 1 simple drag and drop operation.
Really cool and once again showcasing the incredible power of After Effects CS6.
When you talk about timesaving applications,
this next feature really speaks directly to that.
It's basically the addition of variable mask feathering.
You've always had the ability to actually modify a feathered soft edge to a mask shape,
but the width of the feather was the same around the entire mask.
So what we have in this example is we've got a car and we have a shadow.
In this first example here, we've got 2 masks,
1 with minimal feathering to define the outline of the car
and the other with a generous horizontal feather to capture the shadow in front of the car.
With the new variable width mask feathering we can do all of this with 1 simple mask.
Let's go ahead and twirl this down here, select this one.
Now you can see that we actually have 1 mask.
You can see that you've got controls here to adjust the actual width of the feather,
and this is all done in 1 simple process.
Really easy and just again a great time-saver.
Okay now, continuing on with some great additions that we've added,
Cycore effects inside of After Effects CS6 are now all 32-bit,
which of course means that you can use this with all of your greater than 8-bit footage.
Better-looking footage, better-looking effects processing.
And lastly, continuing on with some integration with other new features inside of CS6,
SpeedGrade LUTs.
In the previous version of After Effects, we introduced the ability to look up tables
and actually bring LUTs directly into After Effects and apply them to your footage.
Now that Adobe SpeedGrade is part of Production Premium,
you can of course bring in .look files directly into After Effects as well.
So in the footage that we have here,
you can see that we've got this kind of flat-looking piece with the car,
and I wanted to bring in some specific looks that were created for me
to apply to this footage.
So I can go over to Effects & Presets.
We're going to pull up the same LUT feature that we had, Apply Color LUT, like this,
and now we can choose a LUT file.
You see we have a couple of different presets here.
Let's go ahead and go to our film_log_grade.look,
and you'll notice that we can also still bring in 3dl, cube, and csp files.
Click Open, it applies the LUT,
RAM preview, and there it is.
Unbelievably fast, unbelievably quick.
If you want to add a different LUT, a different look, let's go to something like a 3strip,
click OK, RAM preview, and it's done.
Great new features, incredible performance,
incredible enhancements to really speed up your workflow.
Those are just some of the new things in the incredible After Effects CS6.
[Adobe]
