After Effects 9.0.1 update is available
If Adobe Update Manager hasn't already told you about this, go ahead and check for new updates for After Effects CS4. (Choose Help > Updates or go to the Windows download page or Mac OS download page.)
There are a lot of fixes and tweaks in this update. You can read about them in the After Effects 9.0.1 release notes. I'll mention a few here, though, since some of these are important enough that I really want to make sure that people see them:
- The Auto-save feature was marking a project as saved, which would prevent the normal save commands (like Ctrl+S) from working properly and would make it possible to exit without saving work and without being prompted to save. This has been fixed.
- The Puppet effect (the effect underlying the Puppet tools) was clipping results in 3D layers incorrectly. This has been fixed.
- Layers imported from Illustrator were being imported at the wrong size. This has been fixed.
- Working with 3D object layers from Photoshop is much more stable.
- The Exposure effect was producing garbage at color bit depths of 8bpc and 16bpc when negative Offset values were used.
- When you chose Help > After Effects Help or pressed F1 while connected to the Internet, the After Effects Community Help and Support page would open. The behavior has been changed so that the home page of the After Effects CS4 Help document itself is opened. You can still get to the Community Help and Support page; just choose Help > Community Help and Support or click the Community Help and Support link on the home page of After Effects Help. This change was a tough call, since we want to make sure that people both have an easy time finding Help and are introduced to the wealth of resources on the new Community Help and Support page. Please, let us know what you think about this change. There are feedback links in various places, and you can leave a comment here if you like. Really, we need this feedback to know what is working for you and what isn't. Trish and Chris Meyer had an opinion about the previous behavior.
Oh, and I understand that there's some support for some camera or other, too. ;-)
Comments
What's that RED camera you mentioned at the end? It seems nobody on the forums is talking about it!
:-)
Cf
Posted by: Clint | December 11, 2008 8:52 AM
Can I ask why the PAL square pixel widescreen preset has been changed from 1024x576 (720x576 - 1.42 aspect ratio) to 1050x576 (720x576 - 1.46 aspect ratio)?
This seems either a major bug or a rejigging of the PAL format that I am unaware of.
I am amazed that something like this could get through Adobe's testing with no warning to end users.
Posted by: James Hawkes | December 13, 2008 4:54 AM
Regarding the new pixel aspect ratio (PAR) values...
The old numbers were wrong. The new numbers correct this long-standing error. For details see this section of After Effects Help:
"Pixel aspect ratio and frame aspect ratio"
If you want to discuss this change in detail, I recommend bringing questions to the After Effects user-to-user forum.
Posted by: Todd Kopriva | December 13, 2008 8:13 AM
We have an 8-core Intel (2.8s), 8GB RAM, Nvidia 8800, running Leopard. The footage is all being run off a Sonnet 5-drive RAID eSata box. The footage is ProRes.
Our G5 Quad preview/renders are at par or better than our 8-core Intel (the G5 has the same RAM, but is on Tiger). We're running AE7 on the G5 and CS4 on the Intel.
We're just wondering if this is purely a RAM issue and that we're going to need more in order to optimize CS4's abilities? If so, how much RAM should we really looking to put into the system? Also how much RAM can we allocate to each core in CS4? I've seen mixed responses on that.
Cheers.
Posted by: Matt | December 23, 2008 10:46 AM
Matt,
These kinds of questions are better answered on the After Effects user-to-user forum. Several motion graphics and visual effects professionals help people on that forum to deal with questions like yours. I monitor that forum, too, so I can help you to get an answer there.
For the specific numbers, start by reading the "Memory usage and storage" section of After Effects Help on the Web.
Posted by: Todd Kopriva | December 23, 2008 12:06 PM