February 6 2010
An interesting (but not terribly surprsing) message was posted on Twitter a couple of days ago:
“@chad_perkins Back from Adobe. Finally can tell you that the next version of After Effects is a WEAK upgrade (IMHO). But PS and AI will be GREAT upgrades!”
(via AE Portal)
The original statement has since been retracted because apparently the poster was under an NDA and spoke too soon… luckily I am bound by nothing of the sort, so I get to “retweet” (as it were) whatever I want.
No official word on new features yet, but judging by the rumors making the round it looks like After Effects CS5 is going to be the second lackluster upgrade in a row, 64-bit support notwithstanding.
Maybe the company that is no longer in the Flash business needs to spend a little less time coming up with cheesy feel-good marketing slogans and instead focus on what they used to be good at:
Making tools that just let their users get their damn work done.
Hint: Homebrew installers that take more than an hour to complete and require one to shut down their web browsers, upgrades that lay waste to all existing plug-ins and the oh-so pretty “Flash-y” but increasingly non-standard GUIs are not things that make artist’s lives any easier. Nor do they “help people communicate”, to put it in Adobe’s terms.
January 18 2010
A quick note as I’ve heard this this question come up a lot lately from people reading my earlier post and in discussions on various forums on the topic of AE CS5 being 64-bit only.
Will Normality / Atlas / Generator be ported to 64-bit for After Effects CS5?
The short answer: No.
Longer answer: Adobe has made the business decision to deprive me (and all other professional AE users) of a significant investment by removing support for 32-bit plug-ins, e.g. all existing third-party plug-ins, in AE CS5.
Again, this was not done for technical reasons, it was purely a business decision.
Along with my invaluable collection of third-party plug-ins I also lose the functionality I require to do my daily work. Now I need to go out and find replacements for stable and time-tested tools and in some cases even develop new ones to replace custom software I do not own the rights to.
AE’s main strength IMHO was the sheer number of third-party plug-ins that are not available for other platforms. In a way Adobe has leveled the playing field.
In light of this predicament I in turn have also made a business decision: I’m simply taking my business elsewhere.
As I’ll have to replace all my plug-ins anyway, this is the perfect opportunity for me to ditch After Effects for a more powerful solution. One that, ironically, manages to run in both 32– and 64-bit. And in Linux!
A word to the After Effects community
I’m not doing this out of spite or to harm the AE community in any way and I apologize to all users that have come to rely on my plug-ins for their daily work.
Updating my software to run in CS5 means I myself would have to invest in the new version, and I’m sure you understand that’s not something I’m prepared to do just to support some free plug-ins.
Just like Adobe’s, mine is purely a business decision.
