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canoli
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any AfterFX CS6 users here?

Tue Jun 11, 2013 8:38 am

hey All, just wondering if anyone has experience with the Global Performance Cache in After Effects CS6, if you actually notice a benefit from it or not. On paper it sounds totally great but in practice...?

I'm currently running Production Premium CS5.5 on Windows 7. Aside from the UI improvements in Premiere Pro (which are actually huge) for me there's no compelling reason to upgrade to CS6...except for that Global Performance Cache dealie in AfterFX.

Any thoughts, advice? Thanks!

ps - of course i asked in the Adobe forums...a few responses, mostly positive, but everyone there is hung up on talking about the "creative cloud" these days. the less said about that the better imho!
 
CityEater
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Re: any AfterFX CS6 users here?

Thu Jun 13, 2013 9:37 am

Hey boss,
I work in PP 5.5 and AE 5.5. I have a separate workstation I have a CC AE 6 install running on so I use both fairly regularly. Is there much of a difference? Yes in terms of render times but its not night and day. The whole performance cache system is borked in CS/CC anyway and its frustrating that it isn't automated (Its not something I need to be manual, whatever's going to render quickest is all I want) so if that's the sole reason you're making the jump then no I wouldn't do it.
But CS6 is brighter, shinier and the tools are more refined and better threaded or accelerated; it isn't fundamental though.
As a typical task I'll pass a shot straight from a PP sequence to AE (both 5.5) for stabilization and laying in text or what have you. I can't do the integrated timeline stuff from PP 5.5 to AE 6, I could just drag and drop the edited shot into CS6 but its not the neat passed out AE seq on the PP timeline. I would prefer to use 6 but it isn't a giant groaning pain to work in AE 5.5, its just slightly slower and some of the tools are clunkier, or missing.
I edit drama/industrials so my usage may be different to yours and I regularly do 3 hour renders and up. I use AE for a pretty limited set of tools so if you're working with the newer particle engine or want the 3d text engine you may get a larger boost moving to 6 than I got.
I never considered going from PP 5.5 to 6, there just wasn't any real benefit for my work, it was all pretty pointless for me but I probably will upgrade my CC license to the production package (Audition, Prem Pro, After effects) when CS7 launches as my AE CS6 install will upgrade automatically and its not a hell of a lot more just to get the whole production suite (I just get the year licence). If you can bear with 5.5 being the last CS you'll be able to get in a box.
PP CS 7 (or whatever they've called it) has things like the stabilizer/tracker built in and that changes my workflow quite a bit as it would mean fewer passes to AE. It may be worth just signing up to that when it launches.

I hope this helps.
 
vandy
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Re: any AfterFX CS6 users here?

Thu Jun 13, 2013 11:25 am

It does makes things a *little* snappier while working but in the end, you are still bottlenecked by CPU, RAM and disk throughput. The biggest performance gain for me was using a SSD raid 0 array for my projects (for cache and assets). Is it worth upgrading from CS5.5 to CS6 for the caching feature alone? No. But I like the new tools in AE CS6 and the whole suite feels more coherent across applications. There might be speed improvements in CS6 but it just might be in my head.

Since there will be no CS7 and only "creative cloud" which will require you fork money out to Adobe every year, i'll be sticking with CS6 for a long while.
 
canoli
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Re: any AfterFX CS6 users here?

Tue Jun 18, 2013 12:08 pm

hey you guys thanks a lot for replying.

It sounds like AfterFX isn't a whole lot faster, which I guess is no surprise. I was hoping the new caching was an "OMG" type of improvement but I should've known better.

At least Premiere Pro got a much-needed UI tweak in CS6 - being able to choose audio clip or track keyframes is big for me and the Media Browser shows thumbnails now I understand? The best change for me is the way scrolling the timeline works in CS6 as opposed to previous versions. We get a choice now in the preferences, which is great. I can't tell you how many times that aggravated me, only being able to scroll in time (horiz) instead of vertically through the tracks. I'm a little bummed Adobe can't (or won't) make AfterFX's preview engine about 100x faster.

Thanks again for your replies I really appreciate it.
 
Airmantharp
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Re: any AfterFX CS6 users here?

Tue Jun 18, 2013 7:01 pm

I'm using Lightroom 5, and I hold firm to my belief that Adobe is incapable of making anything fast.
 
canoli
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Re: any AfterFX CS6 users here?

Wed Jun 19, 2013 12:26 pm

well they did one thing fast - they turned me off buying any more of their products. Seriously this new subscription-only model, a.k.a. Pay Every Month OR ELSE (or else the software stops working) is for the birds. Once I buy my license for CS6 I'm done handing over money to Adobe.

I rarely get that Wow! feeling working inside Adobe's apps (video apps) because they can't give me real-time feedback for anything but the easiest codecs at SD rez. For high-rez or difficult codecs experimenting/tweaking means 90% waiting / 10% creative thinking/tweaking. Using proxies, low-rez (and other workarounds) kind of sucks. That's why I had such high hopes for this Global Performance Cache in AfterFX but from all I gather it's more "meh" than "wow."

Even still images in Adobe's premier app, Photoshop, though it's finally 64-bit it still takes forever to save large-ish (>=200MB) .psd files. Why? Because Adobe hasn't optimized the code for multi-threading for opens or saves. Worst of all once you hit "save" Photoshop is frozen until it finishes. That's just corny, ridiculous in 2013. Uncompressed TIFFs are the answer but ... I mean ... "thee" premier image-editing program can't save its native files faster than we did in the Win95-era?

Maxon leverages all 12 threads + OpenGL for nearly everything I ask it to do... it seems like Adobe ought to be able to as well. I realize they're completely different tools and it's really not a fair comparison but in C4D I start the playhead and tweak to my heart's content in real-time. Even complicated animations - particle systems, hard/soft body dynamics, etc. - update while they're running (there are exceptions of course, mostly the result of generating too many particles). But in Premiere Pro even ONE stream (without any FX), you play the timeline that's it. You can sit and watch it, period. As soon as you grab a tool or touch anything in the UI (almost anything) your movie stops. Supposedly that's been fixed in CS6; I hope so, that would be huge.

// Adobe rant. Even with its limitations I love their software. But as far as renting it, paying monthly? No thanks.

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