About Dynamic Link in CS5 + tutorial

Todd Kopriva notes that Dynamic Link in CS5: no longer a one-way street on his Premiere Pro work area blog. Here's an excerpt:

In Creative Suite 4, Dynamic Link was a one-way street. If you used Dynamic Link to send information from, say, After Effects to Adobe Premiere Pro, you couldn’t later use Dynamic Link to send information from Adobe Premiere Pro to After Effects. You had to restart the applications to reset the direction and use Dynamic Link going the other direction.In Creative Suite 5, that limitation is gone.

This is a huge improvement. But most people didn’t notice, because we didn’t trumpet this in our lists of new features. The only way that you would’ve known is if you noticed that the note in the CS4 documentation about the limitation had vanished from the CS5 documentation.

Read the rest, with links to more info and a reminder to use the free CS5 updates to avoid common bugs.

Update: Andrew Devis added another video tutorial, Dynamic Link for the AE Workflow, which doesn't seem to cover DL between products other than Premiere and AE. And yes, Dynamic Link only works with the Production Premium and the Master Suites, not between standalone versions.

Repoussé in After Effects CS5

Chris Meyer has intro videos on the Repousse 3D feature from Photoshop CS5 Extended. He covers this relatively immature feature in both Photoshop and After Effects in his video tutorial series New Creative Techniques at Lynda.com (shown below). Chris also provides a few comments on lights & shadows, nVidia acceleration, and so forth at Todd Kopriva's blog and in Creating Motion Graphics.

Update: see a Shortformvideo tutorial on how to get Fringe-style floating 3D text using Repousse in with AE and PFHoe.

CS5 & CUDA reports: Tom's Hardware + more

Several review or reports on CS5 & CUDA have emerged recently, including:

• Driving the Engine: As Adobe updates the capabilities of its new Mercury Playback Engine, Premiere Pro editors are rethinking theirs from Millimeter

• The Quadro FX 4800 for Mac + Premiere Pro CS5 = fast: Beyond CS5 there’s other reasons you might want a 4800. Like DaVinci Resolve for Mac at PVC

• The Mercury Engine That Could: nVIDIA CUDA Acceleration - Quadro 4800 Mac at LAFCPUG.

The latest out is a Tom's Hardware report on Adobe CS5: 64-bit, CUDA-Accelerated, And Threaded Performance. Undigested here, it's not clear immediately how closely the testing followed Adobe guidance, like given by Todd Kopriva in Please try recommended memory settings for After Effects CS5 and give feedback. The report asks:

"Assume you have CS4 and are considering CS5 as a way to become more productive through getting the same tasks done more quickly. We’re going to examine three possible vectors that could be responsible for this performance increase:

1. Upgrading from CS4 to CS5. This gives you the benefits of shifting from 32- to 64-bit code and addressing extra memory above the 4 GB threshold.
2. Increasing CPU threads. This could be through the addition of cores as well as from leveraging Intel’s Hyper-Threading (HT) feature.
3. Employing CUDA. At this early stage of the industry’s adoption of general purpose GPU acceleration, Adobe has started to weave in support for Nvidia’s CUDA platform. We hope that OpenCL and/or DirectCompute support follows soon, but for now we have to examine CUDA as a case study in what exists today and a harbinger of what will come.

Could it be that stepping up from CS4 to CS5 alone could yield enough benefit to make a hardware upgrade unnecessary? Or will an upgrade to CS5 plus bringing CUDA into play make a $500 processor overhaul mandatory? Let’s try to find out."

DSLR and 3D stereoscopic resources for Premiere

As part of an effort to head off new users going to Apple or Avid, Adobe posted useful DSLR video and 3D stereoscopic resource pages for Premiere.

The Adobe TV on DSLR shooting and editing has a range of useful basic info, which extends beyond to Richard Harrington's training initiatives. Essential resources not in the Adobe HDSLR list include resources like Prolost by Stu Maschwitz (pictured), Oliver Peters, and Camera Log from Adam Wilt.

See also AEP posts Realtime 3D stereoscopic editing in Premiere CS5, Stereoscopic 3D resources for After Effects, as well as posts labeled DSLR and stereoscopic.

Update: see also workflow guides for several high-end cameras and formats in Premiere Pro CS5 and After Effects CS5 from Todd Kopriva; it includes Canon DSLR.

Scaling in Premiere Pro CS5

Todd Kopriva and Steve Hoeg share some details about scaling with CPU and CUDA in Premiere Pro CS5, which AE users can only look on with envy unless there's a Premiere render path through Dynamic Link or import. At least there's another option than Photoshop. Note also that deinterlacing and blending modes are GPU-accelerated, and there are GPU-accelerated effects [update: see a list in link comments]. Here's an excerpt on scaling:

"When Premiere Pro CS5 is just using the CPU for the processing of scaling operations, it uses the following scaling methods:

• playback: bilinear
• paused: Gaussian low-pass sampled with bilinear
• high-quality export (Maximum Render Quality off): Gaussian low-pass sampled with bilinear
• Maximum Render Quality export: variable-radius bicubic (never used on unrendered footage)

The variable-radius bicubic scaling done on the CPU is very similar to the standard bicubic mode in Photoshop, though the Premiere Pro CS5 version is multi-threaded and optimized with some SSE instructions. Even with these optimizations, it is still extremely slow. For high-quality scaling at faster-than-real-time processing, you need to use a CUDA card.

When Premiere Pro CS5 is using CUDA on the GPU to accelerate the processing of scaling operations, it uses the following scaling methods:

• playback: bilinear
• paused: Lanczos 2 low-pass sampled with bicubic
• export: Lanczos 2 low-pass sampled with bicubic

For export, scaling with CUDA is always at maximum quality, regardless of quality settings. (This only applies to scaling done on the GPU.) Maximum Render Quality can still make a difference with CUDA-accelerated exports for any parts of the render that are processed on the CPU. Over time, we are working on reducing the list of exceptions to what can be processed on the GPU. For an example of a limitation that can cause some rendering to fall back to the CPU, see this article: “Maxium dimensions in Premiere Pro CS5″.

When rendering is done on the CPU with Maximum Render Quality enabled, processing is done in a linear color space (i.e., gamma = 1.0) at 32 bits per channel (bpc), which results in more realistic results, finer gradations in color, and better results for midtones. CUDA-accelerated processing is always performed in a 32-bpc linear color space. To have results match between CPU rendering and GPU rendering, enable Maximum Render Quality."

Read the rest at Premiere Pro work area.

'Monsters' and After Effects [updated]

The latest fxpodcast from FXGuide is a broad discussion with Gareth Edwards about his film Monsters, with a few details on the use of AE:

"Like Atilla [which drew from for his Fxphd course], Edwards did all of the vfx and cgi work on Monsters in Adobe’s Creative Suite (including Premiere) and 3ds Max. The film included over 200 visual effects shots. He also served as director and DOP, shooting the movie with a Sony EX3 over several weeks in Central America and Mexico with a crew of four."

Edwards managed to put together the movie for thousands instead of millions (budget rumored $15,000 to the very low six-figures). Here's more from behind the scenes:

Update: Fxguide TV #97 has more coverage... and via @motiongfx Post has more too, see Director's Chair: Gareth Edwards - 'Monsters' by Randi Altman.

Update: Todd Kopriva catches us up on news on Monsters through December 2010 in recent Gareth Edwards work with Adobe software.

AE CS5 memory settings & feedback

The After Effects team posted new memory settings recommendations and is requesting feedback -- which may help make for "smarter, more realistic settings for the next version of After Effects." Here's an excerpt from Todd Kopriva's post Please try recommended memory settings for After Effects CS5 and give feedback.:

"We’re now recommending much higher settings for the RAM To Leave For Other Applications and Minimum Allocation Per CPU preferences. If you start with these numbers both quite high, you will avoid the problems of swapping memory to the hard disk (which is a real performance killer) and starving the background rendering processes such that they shut down and don’t do anything."

Update: There's discussion of this on the Adobe Forums, more in an Adobe FAQ, and some on the AE-List where Carey Dissmore began a thread on a benchmark article on Ars Technica,

"Bumpy road to multi-core: Ars reviews the 12-core 2010 Mac Pro, Main article: http://bit.ly/blLbiS

Of particular note is page 4, http://bit.ly/9fZkcT where FCP and AE don't show very strongly on multithread utilization. Looking forward to some future date when these apps are super-optimized. I know development takes time, lots of time, and it's not easy to just multi-thread any old operation. But still…

BTW Premiere Pro is pretty wicked-fast-impressive these days though. Shows what the hardware can do with new code."

Vector Paint in CS5 (without UI)

@AdobeAE notes how can I live without vector paint?, a discussion of alternatives and feedback on the Vector Paint effect, which was removed for After Effects CS5. The variety and depth of the posts on the Adobe forums attracted the attention of the AE product manager, and more from Todd Kopriva:

"Compositions created with a previous version of After Effects that use the Vector Paint effect will still render in After Effects CS5, but you will not be able to modify the Vector Paint effect properties in these compositions in After Effects CS5.

In other words, it's the Vector Paint UI (user interface) that is missing from After Effects CS5, not the underlying effect for rendering."

The lack of Vector Paint and the ability to paint directly in the comp was also bemoaned on the AE-list recently, as well as on the release of CS5. A partial workaround for wiggle was shared by Trish Meyer on March 8, 2010, "You can copy and paste paint paths to Shape Paths (created by the Pen tool) - just make a dummy path by clicking with the Pen to create it, then paste to it."

Note: since CS4 was shipped with CS5, you can use it for missing features and plug-ins.

Export AE project to Final Cut Studio with Premiere +Avid +switching

Transfers of projects between After Effects and Final Cut is usually a one-way affair, export to AE and render, so there's been plenty of solutions of various cost and effort from Automatic Duck, Boris XML Transfer, Popcorn Island, Dale Bradshaw, etc.

But what if you want to export an AE project to Final Cut? A quick answer, with more resources hopefully forthcoming, is to use Dynamic Link to Premiere Pro, then export a Final Cut Pro project XML file. The project could then be sent on to Apple Color too.

By the way, you can also export to Avid with AAF or export an edit decision list (EDL). Note that trial versions of AE and Premiere are not licensed to support some features, but the log file (FCP Translation Results) describes any translation issues. Some good news is that XML from Premiere Pro CS5 does import into Final Cut Express 4.0.1. [update: read about some bug fixes for XML in Premiere Pro CS5 (5.0.2) update: bug fixes and CUDA support; there may be some inconsistencies though.]

Joost van der Hoeven of Animotion posted a video overview of the new Premiere CS5 feature in Exchange between Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro CS5 (it's also on Adobe TV now):

Premiere Pro CS5 and Final Cut Pro Exchange from animotion on Vimeo.

Update: Todd Kopriva posted about Premiere Pro overview documents for Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer users. Users switching platforms at this point may only be about money at the lower end, since Premiere is still 3rd choice in the NLE hierarchy. For context, see Final Cut Studio 4: a double scoop.

There's really no secret about the kinds of things Adobe could do to improve usability and mindshare beside luring the lukewarm from the Apple camp -- assuming that there are goals in addition to short-term sales. There's plenty of advice aimed at Apple that Adobe could implement. Beyond constant drumbeats pleading for Avid-style media management and Trim Mode (see FCP-List for pro/cons), there are more examples in the feature request list at FCPro.TV and advice from Oliver Peters on Improving FCP and Media Composer, although it's the Avid features missing from Premiere that are important.

CS5 bug fixes, RED, & CUDA enhancements

Todd Kopriva details the latest updates to AE and Premiere CS5 in After Effects CS5 (10.0.1) update: bug fixes and RED features and Premiere Pro CS5 (5.0.2) update: bug fixes and CUDA support.

Tom’s Hardware preliminary CS5 benchmarks

Tom’s Hardware is designing "tests using Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro, complementing our threaded Photoshop benchmark. As you’ll see in the charts below, though, Jon’s CS4-based tests exposed some very interesting results moving from 12 threads to 16 and then to 24. So, I quickly adapted all of Jon’s tests to run in each respective app’s CS5 version to cross-check the results. What we came away with simply blew me away…

With all of that said, we have a story in the works dedicated to testing Adobe’s newest Creative Suite, where we’ll explore the effects of 64-bit operating environments, the Mercury Playback Engine, and GPU acceleration with Nvidia’s few supported graphics cards. For now, it’s fairly safe to say that professionals with multi-socket, multi-core machines will be well-served by an upgrade to CS5."

...see the rest at Benchmark Results: CS4 And Introducing Adobe’s CS5 Suite.

Update: @flockofpixels is reporting that upgrading a "8core Macpro to 24gigs ram. #Aftereffects CS5 render before upgrade - 34mins. After upgrade -11mins."

Christiansen's top 5 features of AE CS5

Mark Christiansen shares some of the ins and outs of his Top Five Features in Adobe After Effects CS5 at Peachpit. Here's a taste of the 6-page article:

'Even better, you can simply copy that shape from Mocha AE and paste it into After Effects as a mask. Read that again, because this may be the biggest feature in After Effects CS5 that almost no one has discovered: Mocha AE can track a shape around an object over time, and you can copy that shape and paste it into a layer's Mask Shape, with keyframe data, right in the Timeline.

I know what you're thinking: "Weren't you just telling me about this other great automated roto tool?" The point is that no tool does everything. Roto Brush data cannot be converted to Mask Shape keyframes, and masks are embedded into so many operations in After Effects and its plug-ins that you could find yourself using Mocha AE as much as Roto Brush to create roto masks.'

Realtime 3D stereoscopic editing in Premiere CS5

Below from AdoveTV, Dave Helmly walks you through a complete workflow for 3D stereoscopic editing in Premiere Pro CS5. In a little over an hour, Dave covers various rigs, 3D viewing options, realtime editing, and export. He also covers Neo3D, a new 64 bit CS5 plug-in from Cineform, and Active, Passive and Anaglyph viewing, as well how to play your videos on a consumer 3D TV.

[update: DAV's TechTable added a note promising more]

For other background see Stereoscopic 3D resources for After Effects, 3D, Cineform, and CS5, and [later] Adobe's resource summary for CS5 Stereoscopic 3D production.



Also, here's the 1st of the 7-part version on YouTube:

Chris & Trish Meyer + AE's Dave Simons on CS5

Chris & Trish Meyer are hosting a webinar on After Effects CS5 next Tuesday July 20th, demonstrating the new Roto Brush tool, mocha shape, Adobe Repoussé, Digieffects FreeForm, Color Look-up Tables, RED R3D settings, the new Per-Character 3D align option, Divide and Subtract modes, and more.

They "will also be joined by Dave Simons - one of the original creators of After Effects, as well as one of the architects behind Roto Brush - to answer your questions about this important new tool."

Find out more at PVC...

By the way, the After Effects team seeks users of Roto Brush to help them improve the tool.

After Effects Help updated, with transition

Todd Kopriva notes updated After Effects Help, and I’m now in Technical Support. Todd is no longer documentation lead for After Effects, which isn't really bad news because Todd will be providing help in a variety of public forums.

As a parting gift, Todd incorporated information and corrections from several hundred comments and updated the following Help documents (including the PDFs if that is your preferred format):

• After Effects CS5 Help
• Premiere Pro CS5 Help
• Adobe Media Encoder CS5 Help
• Premiere Pro CS4 Help
• Adobe Media Encoder CS4 Help

Let's hope the blog continues... read more on After Effects region of interest.

Photoframd claims CS5.5 is in the works [or CS 6]

Update: Apple Insider has some similar material in Documents may offer sneak peek at Adobe's plans for Creative Suite 6. And soon afterward, PC Magazine summarized the most recent survey too in Adobe Creative Suite 6 to Include New HTML5 Tool, Survey Says.

Photoframd is reporting on a planned update: CS5.5. This is the only reference that can be found easily, so it's a rumor at this point -- but it does make sense considering the position of the Flash platform on mobile technology. Photframd thinks an update would be at the price of "either a flat fee for the update or a monthly subscription for continued updates throughout the year."

They don't report on an update to Photoshop. Their section on the video apps is below; the possible AE update looks better than what's listed for Premiere, but not in the same class as the powerhouse 4.1 or 5.5 updates:

Adobe After Effects CS5.5

Design compelling motion graphics and produce visual effects using the industry standard for compositing and animation. Standing out from the background in today’s media-saturated culture requires the visual richness that only Adobe After Effects CS5.5 can deliver. Create compelling motion graphics and blockbuster visual effects with tools that deliver unparalleled performance and complete creative control, and save time thanks to tools that help you get the job done efficiently. After Effects harnesses the potential of metadata to optimize today’s production pipelines, and tight integration with Photoshop and leading other Adobe tools ensure your work flows smoothly. Whether you’re working in broadcast, film, or delivering work online or to emerging devices, Adobe After Effects CS5.5 is a must-have tool.

New After Effects CS5.5

• Remote Render Queue Monitoring: Monitor the progress of your renders from the web or on mobile devices. Get instant updates if your render encounters a problem, and be notified the moment a render is complete.
• Persistent Disk Caching: Minimize the need to re-render frames and see previews more quickly as you work by saving previews to disk on a per layer and per comp basis.
• Enhanced Stereoscopic 3D workflows: More easily set up stereo camera rigs inside of After Effects and render from multiple cameras without duplicating the comp.
• Source timecode support: More easily communicate frame-accurate information with others using the same project footage in other post-production tools.
• Small changes that make a big difference to your daily workflow
• New support for importing and exporting tapeless formats

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5

Craft your story efficiently, thanks to the superior performance that Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 delivers. Work faster with the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine, which offers native 64-bit support and GPU acceleration so you can edit complex, high resolution projects fluidly. Edit virtually anything, thanks to broad, native tapeless camera support that eliminates transcoding and rewrapping, seamless Adobe integration, and easy project exchange with Final Cut Pro and Avid editing software. With capabilities that extend beyond the edit suite to pre-production and delivery, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 delivers a fluid, high-performance workflow with professional results.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 includes Adobe Encore CS5 and Adobe OnLocation CS5. Adobe Encore CS5 software is a versatile, interactive authoring tool you can use to deliver projects for DVD, Blu-ray Disc, or a web version of your disc project. Adobe OnLocation CS5 software is a powerful, direct-to-disk recording, logging, and monitoring solution — helping you create high quality, metadata-rich assets and effortlessly move your ideas from planning into production.

New in Premiere Pro CS5.5

• Faster performance and stability with enhanced Mercury Playback Engine - Work dramatically faster thanks to sweeping performance and stability enhancements in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. Open projects faster, scrub through HD and higher-resolution footage more fluidly, and play back complex long-format and effects-heavy projects more reliably.
• Get up to speed quickly with Adobe Premiere Pro if you know other NLEs - Take advantage of the most requested editing enhancements, which add up to big productivity gains and smoother day-to-day workflows. Powerful editing and user interface enhancements simplify everyday tasks, making a big difference in your workflow whether you’re an experienced Adobe Premiere Pro user or you’re more familiar with Final Cut Pro or Avid software.
• Expanded native tapeless workflow - Adding to existing support for P2, XDCAM, AVCHD and DSLR cameras, new native support for the latest tapeless camera formats means you never waste valuable production time transcoding or rewrapping and always have access to the original file’s pristine quality.
• Closed captioning support - Easily create closed captioning and subtitles. Output video with captioning to tape and disc as well as to formats for web playback that meet Section 508 standards.

Preference mod unlocks CS5 CUDA acceleration

Maltaannon notes an undated article by Studio 1 Productions, How to Unlock Adobe Premiere CS5 use almost any NVIDIA graphics card with CUDA acceleration.

Caveats on this unsupported modification and its origin on forums were discussed here in May in Preference mod widens CS5 CUDA acceleration. The new article above details additional tests with a wider range of Nvidia graphics cards and notes that power requirements may change with new cards. Having inexpensive hardware acceleration for a few layers with effects on DSLR footage has made some users pretty happy; conversation on the mod continues at the Adobe forums.

Update: there are some instructions for the same on the Mac at Insanely Mac in How To Cuda / Mercury Engine on Premiere CS5 / Snow Leopard [ lower end graphic cards ].

Exporting from Premiere Pro CS5

via @AdobePremiere, Jeff Bellune shows how to export video from Premiere Pro CS5. He covers the important gotchas of Export Settings and the Adobe Media Encoder (AME) UI, except for dealing with source-output frame size changes.

Note that CUDA exceleration can make exports faster, for example when scaling, especially with a next generation card like the GeForce 470. Encoding is not currently accelerated in hardware; the Elemental Encoder plug-in for Premiere wasn't developed for CS5.

Adobe TV has several other videos on exporting video & stills and on AME. Here's how to export just a still, which is a bit faster than exporting to AME:

Little things in Photoshop CS5

In All the Little Things, Julieanne Kost covers all those little features in Adobe Photoshop CS5 that may get overlooked.

Sapphire 5 for After Effects

Genarts recently released a CS5 version of their original big set, Sapphire 5 for After Effects. Here's a few highlights:

• over 220 effects in lighting, stylize, blur, comp, render, distort, time and transition categories, each with unique options and parameters
  
• includes 15 new effects such as TVDamage, TVChannelChange, Technicolor, and new transitions
• GPU acceleration, with NVidia GeForce 200 or 400 series or Quadro 5800 graphics card required for maximum performance
• supports full 32-bit floating point for all internal processing, improving quality for many effects
• Sapphire plug-ins for AE are licensed per machine, so one serial number allows you to use them on multiple AE compatible host applications on the same computer.

Sapphire is a massive package that's become something of an industry standard package across platforms. Genarts has brings even more to this rev, but it does come at a price and even seems to compete with the other packages by Genarts, Tinder and Monsters/Raptors. Happily there are trial and monthly rental versions, and a slew of tutorials available to make a proper evaluation. Here are a few video intros of the new version: