Filmmaker’s open Letter to Adobe.

[shashbugu]

Production Premium CS4 has been a blessing in many ways. Most of us filmmakers have been able to earn a living with the different programs contained in CS4. Dynamic link and Adobe Bridge are very smart and intuitive features that helps get a lot of creative work done fast and clean in Photoshop, AE and PPro. I have read and seen some of the features of the future products. The workflow and Mercury Playback speed is insane. The 64 bit memory engine is bonkers (can I get an Amen). The new proposed Redcode, playback acceleration and FLUT handling will in my honest opinion be the most welcome additions to CS5 here on Reduser.

Here are the quips.
Color correcting a long feature in AE is a daunting task, its cool to dynamically link a clip to AE for some effects. But for color correction, grading, and finishing it’s like pulling teeth. The tools are there in AE, but the interface is perfect for what it does best shot to shot effects and composting. If and only if the interface in Adobe Light room can some how be integrated into AE or better yet if Light room CS5 could handle video via dynamic link or xml.
The missing suite in the CS4 Production Premium is definitely color correction and grading. There are many plug-ins, magic bullet look and colorista, color finesse, Boris continuum etc, but the CS4 interfaces are just not conducive to grading.

Since we all know it will be too much to ask for a new application whilst the others are being written for 64 bit, can we at least get XML export to send our edited and effects ready projects to color, scratch, smoke etc. In the future we can at least hope for a new application for grading. Right now CS5 looks like a very promising suite of tools we all can’t wait to get our hands on. The engines seem very very fast, lets just hope the tools have been updated as well.

 

[dino g]

delivered to adobe.

 

[Mark Allen]

If we're delivering messages to Adobe. CS4 reliably rendering 2k+ files and finding the memory leak that causes most 2k+ renders to fail would be appreciate by myself and my entire staff of artists and probably my competition as well.

At this point it's pretty clear AE on the mac at least is broken. I don't want them to shift to Nuke because I don't want to learn a new application.

 

[Amir Stone]

Hi shashbugu,

I agree, AE could definitely benefit from better color correcting tools. If you could be more detailed about the type of color correcting tool that would be useful to you that would be helpful. This is something that is on our plate every cycle and we weigh it against other features.

A little secret, if you dynamic link a ppro project that has a three way color corrector in it, and bring it into AE, the effect will in fact show up, however it will not have any pretty Custom UI (just controls for each parameter). Would it be sufficient to simply upgrade this effect with better custom UI, or were you looking for something different?

Mark,
Why do you say AE on mac is broken? Please elaborate if you are having a problem. Hopefully CS5 should fix your reliability issues. With 64bit, expect less out of memory issues; the limits for out of memory issues to much much higher, as AE can now use all of your system ram (instead of just 2GB limit imposed by a 32bit application).

Thanks for the feedback, it is always welcome,
Amir
Adobe After Effects Developer

 

[alexx_hg]

Hi shashbugu,

...If you could be more detailed about the type of color correcting tool that would be useful to you that would be helpful.
Amir
Adobe After Effects Developer

Amir, I'll take you up on that.
The most CC tools are already there it´s the handling and the way how it´s organized.
For example the Hue/Saturation Tool. While it is a powerful tool the handling is pain in the a$$. Give it a colorwheel with the additional opportunity selecting the colors with numbers. At least give them a track/keyframe-able powermask inside, and the half way is done.
Could you please start especially with this effect very urgently?

thank you
alex

 

[Stepan Kment]

color management and more critical issues

color management and more critical issues

I'd add:

* premiere is a nice thing, however for real world processing quite useless. Hard to imagine doing some advanced secondaries in there.

* there are plugins for grading, however in external windows, out of afx color management, so useless for anything but Rec709 (provided one has decklink and some calibrated HD screen attached plus these plugins send the image there). Even worse, one has to open the take in separate window, which in fact blocks one from comparing shots to each other, a thing crucial for continuity grades.
* not only tools for grading itself are missing. Critically needed is a library of presets allowing one to quickly copy adjustments from one to another clip - always needed for intercut dialogues and so on
* typical project with cuts in separate clips resulting in 100s of layers forces one to add color adjustment plugin again and again to each layer. Annoying, very.
* r3d import processing dialog is hidden somewhere in footage preferences. Open this like 600 times for the movie and you'll hate it, really!
* and obvious problem is AFX isn't realtime app. This is a barrier almost impossible to overcome. RT playback is needed really for productive grading.

Believe me. I went through this hell.

 

[Kujtim Ereqi]

I can't agree more for a grading solution from Adobe. I have stressed on this in several posts in this forum. If Adobe wants to consolidate Premiere in the Pro market, they should really offer a grading solution.

Currently I use Color Finesse, which comes free with After Effects. It's a very good plug-in, but still lacks some very important capabilities like masking etc.. Since Adobe is already cooperating with Synthetic Aperture why not developing a more sophisticated solution from Color Finesse in cooperation with SA. With Adobe resources, Color Finesse may become a much much better application. It has been almost 5 years since Color Finesse, had his last major upgrade. During this period Adobe had 3 major upgrades.

 

[Shawn R]

Make a plug in for Premiere or hard code it in to the software that audio can be moved independently of the frame? ie: for looping and sync need to be able to move is 1/16 of a frame.

Support better time code burn in. I want what I have in Redcine-X. Actual clip name with actual time. The option to have timecode run the timeline and not restart at each new clip. Right now the timecode in Premiere and After Effects looks like it was added in 10 years ago.

 

[Shawn R]

I can't agree more for a grading solution from Adobe. I have stressed on this in several posts in this forum. If Adobe wants to consolidate Premiere in the Pro market, they should really offer a grading solution.

Currently I use Color Finesse, which comes free with After Effects. It's a very good plug-in, but still lacks some very important capabilities like masking etc.. Since Adobe is already cooperating with Synthetic Aperture why not developing a more sophisticated solution from Color Finesse in cooperation with SA. With Adobe resources, Color Finesse may become a much much better application. It has been almost 5 years since Color Finesse, had his last major upgrade. During this period Adobe had 3 major upgrades.

I can't agree more, Color Finesse upgrade to go along with CS5....:smiley:

 

[Bruce Allen]

I agree, AE could definitely benefit from better color correcting tools. If you could be more detailed about the type of color correcting tool that would be useful to you that would be helpful. This is something that is on our plate every cycle and we weigh it against other features.

Copy Discreet's Color Warper. Take a look at Combustion, Smoke or Flame.

EG give us a nice visual diamond-style keyer, with the built in facility to push the selected colors in a certain direction (eg hue sat brightness, or nudge them somewhere in the RGB cube).

Sometimes I'm trying to isolate a particular shade of red and push it in a certain direction and the only tool I have which works is the Color Range eyedropper keyer - and that hasn't even been updated to 16 bit yet!

Why do you say AE on mac is broken? Please elaborate if you are having a problem. Hopefully CS5 should fix your reliability issues. With 64bit, expect less out of memory issues; the limits for out of memory issues to much much higher, as AE can now use all of your system ram (instead of just 2GB limit imposed by a 32bit application).

Hopefully this will fix my preview bar too? At the moment, about 50% of the time, when I tell After Effects to render a RAM preview, this is what happens:

1. AE starts rendering frames, green bar starts going
2. I go and start reading REDuser
3. I click back on AE (not to make an adjustment, just click once on the app to give it focus and start playback) and - WHAM - it forgets all of the damn frames

We have approx 10 licenses of AE in the office here - most people have the same problem from time to time.

Also, almost every day, AE crashes after I drag and drop footage from the project window to the Timeline. It's not a big problem because it saves a copy of the project, but it's amazingly regular.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Mark Allen]

Hi shashbugu,
Mark,
Why do you say AE on mac is broken? Please elaborate if you are having a problem. Hopefully CS5 should fix your reliability issues. With 64bit, expect less out of memory issues; the limits for out of memory issues to much much higher, as AE can now use all of your system ram (instead of just 2GB limit imposed by a 32bit application).

We're not developers or beta testers, just end users, so I can only speak from an experiential stand point which is to say after using AE for more than a decade I've found that increasingly over the years and peaking with CS4 the number of renders that have been failing due to out of memory issues despite many trial and error configurations of memory settings has been increasing dramatically to the point that it's almost a given that on every project that has any render punch to it at all there will be a failure and time spent trying to figure a solution. I have two projects in house right now that are having issues - one we've still not figured out. It was a carry over from cs3 and we got it working once and not again. Keep in mind that these are all happening on about eight different systems. The rule of thumb between all the artists I work with has been "AE gets in trouble with files over 2k."

I said "on the mac" because we're all using macs and so I can't speak for the PC version.

 

[Amir Stone]

Bruce,

Have you tried updating to 9.02? We fixed a couple drag-drop issues in that patch, as well as a ton of other crashers.

Amir
Adobe After Effects Developer

 

[shashbugu]

Hi shashbugu,

I agree, AE could definitely benefit from better color correcting tools. If you could be more detailed about the type of color correcting tool that would be useful to you that would be helpful. This is something that is on our plate every cycle and we weigh it against other features.

A little secret, if you dynamic link a ppro project that has a three way color corrector in it, and bring it into AE, the effect will in fact show up, however it will not have any pretty Custom UI (just controls for each parameter). Would it be sufficient to simply upgrade this effect with better custom UI, or were you looking for something different?

Thanks for the feedback, it is always welcome,
Amir
Adobe After Effects Developer

Hi Amir,
Thank you for responding to our posts. To answer your question,
1st in my honest opinion AE should not, I repeat “not be built as tool” for color grading or color correction. It can have those tools in it, but the application itself benefits greatly from its dynamic link capabilities with PPro. That said down the development timeline once the Adobe switches the playback engineplayback is changed from ram preview to GPU playback we can start looking at AE beyond compositing and motion graphics.

2nd The real king of the hill for CS5 is PPro.
Many folks on this site would want AE/ PPro to be fused into one product like Smoke, or scratch, or Pablo etc. That’s never going to happen. The interfaces of those products are highly sophisticated but they are only capable of doing a few things. A few things they do exceptionally well.
CS5’s new mercury GPU accelerated engine will be light years ahead of anything out there at a competitive price level. It actually rivals Iridas Frame cycler or Avids hardware accelerated systems. The promised stability, speed, handling of 10k sized footage, 64bit memory architecture etc of PPro CS5 puts it in the high-end category of real-time online tools.
So to answer your question, about the tools I would like to see in AE CS5, I would actually like to see them in a GPU fast Premiere CS5. But here they are.
All the tools listed below actually already exist in other Adobe products. Also these is for both AE and PPro
a. Tools. The color keying/selection tools in lightroom and Photoshop CC curves. These tools are actually in my opinion more intuitive as a secondary CC tool than the color keyer in Apple Color or the color warper in all Autodesk products. The ability to click on a color pixel and saturate or de-saturate, select, change color, shift color etc all with your trackball mouse, or multi gesture track pad is actually faster and cooler than a tangent controller. It’s very nimble, targeted and precise. The standard lift gamma gain wheels together with contrast sliders should have been implemented long ago along with the standard three-way color corrector.
b. Interface. In color correction mode the timeline should automatically switch to large sized thumbnails, without the user having to scale them (I personally saved my workspace in this mode). Only the clips visible in the project window not the whole timeline need to be visible horizontally.
c. Just like PS and AE, Premiere should have adjustment layers or effects tracks, which optionally affect all tracks below or only the immediate track below. These adjustment tracks should be exactly the same as those in AE. You should be able to draw masks with a pen tool, ellipse tool, etc, so effects like CC, can be applied only to the selected area. Power windows on steroids. Beyond secondary color correction these preset masks and freeform vector shapes combined with unlimited softness, animated key frames, 2d tracking ability, corner pinning, shape parenting etc will allow these adjustment layers to create Photoshop style light emulation. The layer could also allow for gradients, vignettes, solid colors, etc.
d. The program should have a master clock that runs the whole sequence not just on a clip-by-clip basis.
e. The GPU should support final rendering and conforming for all codec’s.
f. The Quadro fx card has finite pixel shader capabilities.

All this said I would recommend Adobe really concentrate on making AE GPU accelerated not RAM preview dependent. Also the current vertical arrangement of the plugins, effects windows and sliders is way too rigid, you should be allowed to have your plugins spread horizontally under the composition, window or timeline not just vertically at the side of the monitor. That design is too slow for video work. All windows should have option to be stretched horizontally. Please take a look at Color finesse stand alone version. This is simply the type of interface and tools needed.
Now take a look at Adobe light-room you'll see the interface similarities. thats all we want in AE for color correction. All the Color correction tools in tools in AE, PS and lightroom plus the standard grading tools found in all systems Asc.

 

[Stepan Kment]

CC in Prem or AFX or...

CC in Prem or AFX or...

Hi Amir,
1st in my honest opinion AE should not, I repeat “not be built as tool”

2nd The real king of the hill for CS5 is PPro.

Well... problem is color grading systems are somewhere in between. Prem lacks color management at all, which every real CC system totally depends on. The only way to get calibrated is output to some HDSDI calibrated device I worry. That is Rec709, well.. narrow gamut, but what can one do. If overbrights are correctly handled, then ok:

It is unclear how Prem may handle overbrights. In 32 bit mode, probably yes(?)

Prem lacks advanced masking at all. For primary CC, RedcineX will be perfectly fine imho, very advanced now, just they need some time to finish project saving and fix omissions. For secondaries.. well, AFX actually has great potential.

Btw, AFX also lacks selective feathering all competitors have, that is ability to set feather gradient with another curve. Very bad for high end work. Film with its 24fps and 180deg shutter isn't a video, there are many, many long motion blurs and this selective feather mask is really critically needed very often... hard to workaround, I worry.

However, AFX isn't realtime. Which is very very bad. That is why I claim CC software is somewhere inbetween these two worlds of effects and pure editing.

 

[CK Olsen]

FYI-Audio CAN be moved independently in PPro...

FYI-Audio CAN be moved independently in PPro...

Make a plug in for Premiere or hard code it in to the software that audio can be moved independently of the frame? ie: for looping and sync need to be able to move is 1/16 of a frame.

Support better time code burn in. I want what I have in Redcine-X. Actual clip name with actual time. The option to have timecode run the timeline and not restart at each new clip. Right now the timecode in Premiere and After Effects looks like it was added in 10 years ago.

Shawn-
Audio CAN be moved independently of the frame...
In your timeline window, there is a small triangle menu in the upper right corner of the window frame. Click on this and a menu appears revealing a "Show Audio Time Units" option, which you should select.
Once you've done this, you can click your audio track and move your audio with your mouse in extremely fine increments, like 1000ths of a second... and when you are done, just deselect that option to go back to frame editing.
Hope this helps...
CK

 

[Bruce Allen]

Bruce,

Have you tried updating to 9.02? We fixed a couple drag-drop issues in that patch, as well as a ton of other crashers.

Amir
Adobe After Effects Developer

I'm on 9.02. It crashed on a drag-and-drop yesterday. I think it's something to do with coming out of sleep mode. I'm on an 8-core Nehalem Mac Pro.

Anyway, don't worry about that. Just get someone at Adobe to listen to Shashbugu!

Basically, I and many others would pay $1000 cash right now for either:
1. bulletproof, snappy integration between AE and Premiere
2. enough finishing improvements in Premiere that I don't have to use AE
3. enough conform / color correction / workflow / playback improvements in AE so that it's usable over long projects

Shashbugu has some excellent Premiere suggestions.

Since you're on the AE team, I'll post my AE suggestions in a bit.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Bruce Allen]

Ah, the irony! Got my daily crash right after I posted this. Decided to send my report to Apple (does this ever do anything at all?). Wow, 81 app crashes since last report.

Ah well, guess it's no big secret that we're working on the Clash of the Titans TV campaign

BTW, you'll be pleased to know that that shattering text for the Clash of the Titans logo in the teaser / trailer / TV ads is good old After Effects shatter layered on top of my Cinema 4D renders Although it bugs out and jitters in 16 bit mode, so I have to prerender that layer in 8 bit mode, then go and render the rest at 16 bit...

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[shashbugu]

HA Ha Bruce I hate to be you, all those crashes eeeks on a major production project, men aDOBE NEEDS TO BUY YOU A BEER.

In my rant/letter I forgot to add "Transcoding" to a single powerful Codec or Codecs for online finishing and final conform. its oKay to have multiple native codecs for off_lining, but these codecs react differently to effects and CC further destabilizing the system. Obviously a robust media management meta data/ reliant backend has to be incorporated into Adobe Bridge. The new cinema DNG seems to be the future of raw image handling. Transcoding codecs from different camera systems into the DNG Codec will allow a consistent grading experience throughout.

 

[Mark Allen]

81, Bruce? What, are you just starting?

But, yes, AE has become incredibly crashy. It's tragic.

 

[shashbugu]

Well... problem is color grading systems are somewhere in between. Prem lacks color management at all, which every real CC system totally depends on. The only way to get calibrated is output to some HDSDI calibrated device I worry. That is Rec709, well.. narrow gamut, but what can one do. If overbrights are correctly handled, then ok:

It is unclear how Prem may handle overbrights. In 32 bit mode, probably yes(?)

Prem lacks advanced masking at all. For primary CC, RedcineX will be perfectly fine imho, very advanced now, just they need some time to finish project saving and fix omissions. For secondaries.. well, AFX actually has great potential.

Btw, AFX also lacks selective feathering all competitors have, that is ability to set feather gradient with another curve. Very bad for high end work. Film with its 24fps and 180deg shutter isn't a video, there are many, many long motion blurs and this selective feather mask is really critically needed very often... hard to workaround, I worry.

However, AFX isn't realtime. Which is very very bad. That is why I claim CC software is somewhere in between these two worlds of effects and pure editing.

The truth is only professional colorists want a dedicated Color grading system. The rest of us want or wish for an all in one Swiss army knife application Like Autodesk Smoke or Avid DS. This wont happen in the near future unless Apple realizes that nobody cares for Motion, and consolidates their suite into one application. Adobe on the other hand has a pretty open plugin architecture in their products. With the right interface design, and program abilities plug in manufacturers can fill in the missing tool gap as Red giant has been doing with AE.
The reason why I keep hammering on PPro is because its the youngest application, and has more potential than most other tools out there.
CS5 promises
1. a 64bit memory architecture
2. a GPU accelerated playback engine
3. the ability to handle resolutions up to 10k
4. a supposedly 32 bit float engine borrowed from AE
5. multiformat editing
6. multiple streams of 4k red footage in realtime
A similar system with just those basics will cost $70,000 minimum. Assimilate Scratch is triumphantly touting 2 real time stereoscopic streams running off two Red Rockets, whilst CS5 can hypothetically do this in its sleep. Now I am in no way whatsoever comparing PPro CS% to any other system out there. All I am saying is the potential to add powerful tools to this system will change the way business is done going forward.

Now can you imagine the above playback and memory handling engine with the following architectures added
1. full 3D layers
2. a paint engine
3. effects, solids, shapes and adjustment layers
4. a Robust color grading interface (open to third party plugins)
5.etc etc, tool that already exist in other Adobe apps