I expect Autodesk to ship something that requires esoteric hardware, but not Adobe. This binary hardware differentiation between the ray-tracing haves and have-nots is, to me, unbefitting of After Effects, which has always struck me as the “people’s choice” compositor-such a paragon of accessibility that I consider it a must-have tool for the DV Rebel. I mean, sure, you can try, but the render times will very likely dissuade you. If you have a CUDA card, you can use and enjoy the ray tracer. I don’t begrudge Adobe the decision to accelerate the ray-tracer for CUDA, but I do regret the seeming prioritization of that optimization over any kind of CPU usability. On my $3,000 iMac, one frame of the iPhone animation takes 48 minutes. And by no dice, I mean you would not want to try to render something as simple as a pair of dice. And my top-of-the-line, pimped-out iMac has an AMD GPU. My MacBook Pro has an NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M, but that’s not beefy enough for AE6, so I’m stuck with CPU rendering. The problem is, I don’t don’t happen to own one of these supported systems. The above iPhone animation rendered in 2 hours, 15 minutes on a machine with a $2,000 NVIDIA Tesla C2075 GPU. And indeed, on a supported system, After Effects CS6 can ray-trace pretty darn fast. Adobe decided to accelerate their new renderer using the NVIDIA CUDA technology, where the massive parallel processing capability of a GPU is turned to general computing tasks. The results can look amazing.īut ray-tracing can be computationally expensive. It supports motion blur, depth-of-field, diffused reflections, and soft shadows, all in 32-bit floating point color. The After Effects 3D renderer is a powerful and feature-rich ray tracer. So I’m happy to see true 3D geometry finally spinning in my AE viewport. But now it’s hard to imagine compositing without a 3D environment, and After Effects has been lapped several times by its competition in 3D features. At the time, adding 3D layers to a dedicated compositor was a somewhat controversial move. AE was way ahead of most of its competition (except flame, of course) in bringing 3D capabilities to a compositing environment. The ray-traced 3D renderer is the first major update to AE’s 3D capabilities since they were first introduced in 2001–2002. Global Performance Cache (sexier than it sounds)Įach of these features is worth its own post, so I’ll just pick one to start. The new version includes some exciting new features: Mac OS: macOS v10.6.8, v10.7, v10.8, or v10.While I was busy making Canadian Lysol commercial history, Adobe released Creative Suite 6, including a major update for my favorite creative software of all time, After Effects. See the CS6 FAQ for more information about Windows 8 support. Windows: Microsoft Windows 7 with Service Pack 1, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. Adobe After Effects CS6 System Requirements Operating system Some improvements have also been made, including support for motion blur and 3D lights of the composition in the significant CycoreFX effects. These effects include Cross Blur, Color Neutralizer, Kernel, Threads, Environment, Rainfall, Snowfall, Block Load, Plastic, Line Sweep, WrapoMatic and Overbrights. New effects that weren’t connected with After Effects before. 35 effects offered by After Effects CS6 support 32-bit floating-point processing. This software offers more than 80 new built-in effects, including the CycoreFX HD Suite that supports 16-bit-per-channel color. They are selected according to the angle of the camera with which the video was shot.Ī lot of built-in effects. Its work is based on two user-selectable algorithms, Warp or Pixel Motion, as well as scan directions. After Effects Mac and Windows CS6 versions has a new Rolling Shutter Repair effect. More opportunities for working with DSLR footage.
With this tool, you can also keyframe individual points on the timeline and adjust them using a masked object. Now, you can change a single path to adapt hard and soft edge surfaces, for example, motion blur in a moving object.
Buy Adobe After Effects CS6 and you will be able to use this feature too. You can control fill and stroke colors, edit shapes, use shape operators, such as Wiggle Paths and Wiggle Transform. With this feature, you can import vector AI and EPS files with logos, artwork and designs, then convert them to shape layers that you can edit. After that, it can make an appropriate Camera layer and put new 3D layers at coordinates that match the objects and surfaces found in the source scene.Ī new Create Shapes from Vector Layer feature. Instead of tracking an object in a recorded video, the 3D Camera Tracker tracks the number of objects and reengineers the initial position of a camera. After Effects CS6 has an important new visual effects feature – 3D camera tracker that will be very useful for motion graphics designers too.