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After Effects CS4 64bit ?!
The never ending quest for speed 08/06/08updated 24/09/08
At long last the page for the new features of After Effects cs4 is up. Im not seeing 64bit anywhere?!
updated 16/09/08
Interesting article published yesterday from digital arts about some of AFX4 new features:
Better integration with Premiere Pro
Path for AE to Soundbooth
AFX4 shipping with Mocha-AEMore features to be released on September 23
update 24/08/08:
Seems the next version of After Effects will be Intel-only on the Mac. Dropping PowerPC support - I guess Adobe have to push the software as hard as they can and not supporting old systems is the tradeoff. If you are working on any serious project you'd need the power of modern machines anyway so while I can understand that people are frustrated, I would personally rather streamlined software
I've been using After Effects since the early days for my broadcast design work. Ever since the beginning the question was - how do I speed the render up? Looking at all the tiny settings in AFX - the cache, scratch disk, opengl settings just to extract the tiniest bit of speed. I used to dream of working on an ice'd system (article from 1999) and wooooo how that would make things faster!!!
Even now, years later, with tight deadlines the question is still about render times...Starting out on a single core machine with a handful of ram meant that ram previews were usually 1/4 Res and zoomed back as far as I could while still being able to see what was going on. And it meant that you had to be pretty certain about your design as it was going to take some time to render.
Ever since I got my first 64bit chip I refuse to go back to a 32bit machine. Not necessarily making things faster (this is well documented) but in the never ending quest to move forward I want to know that I'm at least talking in a 64bit than 32.
In the 64bit tool interim tools like paint.net have emerged, not as powerful as Photoshop however you can see the potential of a pure 64bit code when working with this program. Being able to handle massive amounts of data is a dream come true.
I remember my thrill when I heard that CS3 was coming out and frantically searched the net before it's release date to find if it would be 64bit compatible. Only to be left wondering what was going on? With the recent buzz of CS4 (Photoshop, Lightroom, and Adobe's 64-bit roadmap) "soon" to be released in 64bit I can't help wonder if After Effects will get the same treatment. I imagine this will be a big shift and a massive rewrite of code as potentially plug-ins will have to be rewritten and many technical issues addressed however with HD content and Blu-ray I'm sure that more and more HD will be produced in the future, and you will need grunt to render it.As a side note to all this, you really have to admire what Nucleo has done as a stop gap for the problem of rendering on multi-core machines. At the time it elegantly solved the problem of having a fast machine and software that didn't allow you to harness that power.
As someone who frequently has very heavy comps in After Effects I am eagerly awaiting news of CS4
Brad Schwede (E) brad@bradschwede.com | analogik.com - multimedia and electronic music group
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