I hate upgrades. They almost always disrupt the flow of production and waste needless millions of user-hours each year. In far to many cases upgrades are little more than a marketing ploy aimed at putting a transient happy face on an otherwise somber annual report. A spurious reason to gouge a faithful user base out of an extra few hundred dollars. Let's face it, in today's investor driven markets, the pressure to re-position an existing program is greater than the pressure to introduce new ones.
The time you spend learning to use a program is your personal investment. It is your hard earned equity. When second rate business executives hire third rate programmers, the first thing they try to do is update the Graphic User Interface. I call it the Earl Scheib treatment, (meaning no disrespect to the company who for fifty years has been making old, beat-up cars shine like new).
The Graphic User Interface ( GUI ) is the industry established method for controlling computer code. It essentially takes an inherently complex, or a series of complex operations and makes them into a single command. Click your eye dropper on the blue background and 'Poof', its gone. That's what computers are all about: simple solutions to complex problems.
Perhaps the easiest way to spot the Earl Scheib treatment is when companies don't even bother to print a manual to accompany their "hot, new-and-improved" upgrade. PDF files are fine for shuttling temporary documents between platforms but only the greediest, lowest-common-denomonator, slime-ball company tries to weasel out of creating a good, understandable hard copy of their product's functionality.
The other indication that you're dealing with some poorly integrated code is the 'Phone Book' syndrome. Poorly written or ill designed upgrades can also be spotted by the sudden blossoming of their requisite support collateral. Apple's FinalCut Pro went from a portly 375 pages for version 1.0 to 1,435 pages for their latest upgrade. I'm sitting here looking at the LA phone book set, both white and yellow pages, which are substantially thinner than the single FinalCut Pro2.0 manual.
While verbose and poorly written manuals are a good indicator of poorly written code, and the absence of manuals indicates a total lack of corporate integrity, it is the changes made to the GUI that remain the most disruptive on a personal level. Many, once leading applications have lost or alienated an otherwise dedicated user base by unnecessarily re-engineering their application.
Instead of helping their users work more efficiently or faster, they give them a 'hip' new interface to make them feel as though there's something radically different going on that is worth the price of the upgrade. In the world of software engineering, it is much cheaper to rework the GUI than it is to actually make the software better.
The rampant egoism of corporate brand managers seem to envision a world of dedicated users where every nuance of change is eagerly awaited. The biggest problem is that while their nicely framed MBA might look swell up on their office wall, the schemes and ploys they learned at business school don't translate to contemporary industry dynamics. Graphics professionals quite simply don't use one package. Never did. Even the most hard core graphics professional has a small arsenal of ancillary applications at the ready. You alienate a user and they'll have another program that does what they need FedExed overnight. Products that mistake innovation with gratuitous re-design often find themselves in the discount bin at the local computer store.
There are of course, those who do it right.
The undisputed leader in powerhouse professional graphics applications has created what might well be the first perfect upgrade. With the release of AfterEffects5.0, Adobe has made the world's favorite motion graphics application better. Yes there are a few new key strokes, but nothing that will interfere with hundreds or thousands of hours of 'residual memory' that you've already hardwired into your brain. This, perhaps more than any other single innovation is what I most admire in AE5. Adobe has quite simply left well enough alone.
The AE interface, which has long represented one of the more utilitarian portals to graphic freedom, remains intact with only a few, small, scattered additions to the GUI, but under the hood ...
Like a hotrod enthusiast gone amok, Adobe has ported, pumped and fuel injected AE5 to the point that it is no longer street legal. They have taken the most powerful motion graphics application on personal computers and simply made it more powerful. So powerful in fact that it will actually change the way designers dream. No longer will you visualize component imagery as a succession of individual frames. AE5's capacity to interactively scrub the animation, breaths life to the production process that has previously only been found on million dollar, dedicated workstations.
Since my initial version of AE5 was beta, it not only came without the perquisite manual (still in production at that time) but Adobe still hadn't finalized the PDF online manual, and that was fine with me. Let others drone on about new and improved this and that, for me the true power of an application or upgrade is illustrated by how much you can get done without resorting to the manual.
As I write this article, I still haven't seen the manual or resourced the online help or even read the rather voluminous press material. In the brief time since I've had the AE5 Beta (code named Melmet) I've used it to create visual effects for a half dozen major motion pictures, two commercials and the entire, new season's graphics package for the Turner SuperStation's hit show Ripley's Believe it or Not! My only regret is that I've only got two thumbs to rate this program with.
Until AE5 showed up, I used Flame and Inferno systems to create 3D moves. While 3D might sound like a bit of an oxymoron with regard to a well established 2D motion graphics package, the dimensional relativity and spatial volume that this new addition gives your graphics is worth the price of admission alone.
Perhaps the best thing about not being walked through all of the new upgrades was that there were pleasant surprises every time I sat down to work. Like the way that effects instantly update so you can get the exact look you want without closing and then waiting for the screen update. or how Parenting allows you to animate layers hierarchically. New vector paint tools (formerly third party plug-ins) are now fully integrated into the root code and work flawlessly every time.
Having worked on visual effects for well over a hundred major motion pictures, the mundane reality is that the most common computer graphics work is cutting masks. I know it doesn't sound glamorous, and it isn't, but the new AE5 makes a quantum improvement in the way the masking tools are implemented. Perhaps most significant enhancement is the ability to assign key-framable motion blur and actually make 'tweaks' and adjustments to your masks in the Comp window.
While the 8 bit environment of Macs and NT machines work well for broadcast production, most cinematic work relies on the higher bit-depth of million dollar work stations. The AE5 Production Bundle uses 16 bit per channel color space processing, and while you may not see the full impact of this rather revolutionary enhancement on your video and internet destined projects, when you actually print your images to film and project them conventionally, the improvement is staggering. I recently created several visual effects for David Lynch's latest movie MULHOLLAND DRIVE, using AE5 and the sequences cut into the final picture seamlessly.
The vast majority of us who use AE for motion picture and broadcast work also use third party video cards to get elements into and out of our computers. Unfortunately, support from AfterEffects has been spotty at best.
This new incarnation not only supports but enhances the entire production environment by updating work to external video monitors using Matrox or CineWave systems.
When used with the HiDefinition CineWave card and some very, very, very fast drives like the new Medea Stream, Fibre Channel Raids (600 Mb sec), AE5 becomes an extremely powerful motion picture production environment. I'm not talking about small independent, miniDV-to-film projects either. AE5 pushes around full resolution, 1080 x 1920, High Definition data like Tony Soprano with a grudge. Even the densest filtersets update with surprising quickness as you interactively scroll across a scene.
AE5 is a major element in a high-end professional production system that competes head-to-head with the biggest, baddest boxes out there. The one and only shortcoming that I've found in AE5 is the lack of direct acquisition tools.
With the bulk of video card manufacturers supporting Apple's unnecessarily obtuse FinalCut Pro bloatware application, graphics professionals are forced to look to programs like Adobe Premiere to capture video, not that this is really a bad thing. Perhaps the next rev of AfterEffects will expand on it's already extensive catalogue of image manipulation tools and embrace the acquisition needs of the emerging HD graphics market.
As much as I eagerly await my production copy of AE5 with its obligatory manual, somewhere, deep within my pixelated psyche there is that element that enjoys this gradual unfoldment. Click on something familiar and it does what it's supposed to do, but something's different, better, faster. All the little surprises, like the first time I played Myst, this is how it should be. Yeah, I know, "relax Billups, its only software".
AUGUST ISSUE OF CINEMA DIGITALE MAGAZINE (translated text)