Neues in After Effects?

Victoria Nece ist seit sieben Jahren Principal Product Manager für Motion Graphics bei Adobe. Davor war sie Motion Designer und Director of Animation bei „The Documentary Group“ (thedocumentarygroup.com) und leitete Grafik, Animation und Design für Dutzende von Produktionen in den Bereichen Rundfunk, Theater und Bildungsprojekte. Und auf der IBC haben wir mit Victoria über die Updates in Adobe After Effects gesprochen und sie hat uns einen Einblick in die neuesten Features gegeben – hier ein Auszug aus dem Interview auf Englisch, welches Ihr vollständig in unserer nächsten Ausgabe lesen könnt.

DP: What is going to happen with After Effects next?

Victoria Nece: We have some really exciting things on the way. We spent the last couple of years rebuilding the core and enabling multi-frame rendering – so you can really take advantage of the full power of the machine our artists have today. And the “even more power” you’ll have tomorrow – we have that foundation in place. Especially if you’re on Mac with the M1 releases. It’s just “night and day difference” faster with preview and export and even the first launch is like seven times faster now.

We are working to speed up every piece of the users „waiting time“.  Another thing we want to speed up is workflows – not just with processing power, but making it so that there are fewer repetitive tasks. The boring stuff can get taken care of by things like Adobe Sensei, so you’re not spending your time on the set-up, but you’re able to get to the creative parts more quickly. Our key focus is giving people more time to be creative. And going forward, a lot of that is about getting the tedious things out of the way.

DP: Do you have an example for that?

Victoria Nece: One of the things we have coming (that I’m excited to be able to sneak at IBC) is native support for OpencolorIO and ACES. We’re really going to streamline colour management, which is going to streamline interoperability – so spending less time on setting things up, and you can get right where you want to change creative things, and not just converting from A to B to C.

DP: ACES in AE?

Victoria Nece: We’re starting with native support in After Effects. Obviously, that’s something we’d like to extend, but I can’t really talk about a timeline for anything beyond after effects so far – but we know that’s the direction where we want to get to. However, inside After Effects we’re going to make it very simple. You have your files and  a couple of things you need to set up, but it’s no longer „spend half an hour just getting there“. You’re able to set things on individual clips as well as on exported media. It’s a much simpler way of working in color and we can handle a lot of things automatically.

DP: How would someone get their hands on that release of After Effects?

Victoria Nece: If you are here at IBC, you can go up to our booth and see it in action – for everybody else, it’s going to be really soon (This interview was on September 9th). We’re really excited and it is coming into our public beta.

If you didn’t know that: Our public beta program has the daily developer builds and everyone who has the Creative Cloud Subscription gets access. You can update every day and see the „latest and greatest“ – there’s always new stuff. Part of what’s so great about it is that in Beta you can give us feedback on features while they’re in development, and tell us if they’re working for you, the artists – or if you’d like them to work in a different way.

If you’re running into issues or if it is meeting your needs, we really want users to help shape the future of the tool!  Particularly with something like Aces, where we know that there are lots of different interop workflows, we want to make sure that what we’ve built is going to work for you. If you want to have that conversation: Visit Adobe MAX, our conference in two weeks – a lot of the developers will be there, and the speakers are also showing interesting, new ways to work.

(…)

DP: And what are you currently playing around with in AE?

Victoria Nece: I love just playing around with After Effects – it’s an infinite toolbox and it’s so open minded about how you use it. We don’t give people a lightsaber effect, but we give people a beam effect and a motion tracker and a glow effect. And you get to assemble these things in new ways. This stacking of different features in ways that they’ve never been used before -and that’s the fun part. I love seeing tutorials where someone makes animation with text animators, but they’re using shapes and using the text animation tools like a procedural shape animation system. I love it when people misuse the tools. I saw someone on Reddit who said, „The paradox of After Effects is that it was built to do things that it was never meant to do“. And we’ve really taken that to heart and that’s something we really want to maintain going forward. Is the idea that after effects, the place where you can do anything.

Again, if you want to see what’s happening, visit Adobe MAX, and the talks will go over a wide variety of industries, workflows, pipelines and everything. You’ll see a lot of creatives going deep into the “place where you can do anything”.  And if you have questions: A lot of our certified instructors will be in attendance – if they don’t know how to, nobody does! (laughs)

DP:  You’ve been working with AE for many years – what are your personal favourite extensions and Plugins? Or what would you wish for when you were an AE-artist?

Victoria Nece: There are so many plug-ins and scripts that I love – I can’t name just one! Picking one – or even my Top 5 would be unfair, because there are sooo many good ones!

What I would have wished for when I was a Motion Graphics designer were motion graphics templates. I come from the world of documentaries where there are a lot of things that you do again and again. Repetitive tasks like making lower thirds. There’s 80 people in a film and you need to put all of their names on screen.

That’s how I got into scripting and writing tools for After Effects, because I didn’t want to type in 80 people’s names. And with Motion templates, you design it once and then hand it off to the editors – where they just type in the name of the person. And then you don’t have to think about that as a motion designer and the editor doesn’t need to come back to you when they realise that somebody’s name is spelled wrong. It really streamlines workflows so that you can actually do the creative part. Just being able to make something once, make all your different variations, and when you have changes, make all those changes at once.

Oh, how I wish I would have had that in my artist days!

(…)

DP: What do you personally think After Effects will be like in 2040?

Victoria Nece: 2040, that’s very far in the future. We’ve always looked at After Effects as an “asset aggregation tool”. You can bring in anything from anywhere, all kinds of different formats and combine them all into one unified design. Whether that’s a composite or a motion design sequence – and really, it’s only about what formats we don’t support just yet.

There’s a lot of things in the works, but it’s also about „Can we use things like AI and Machine Learning to change how we visualize things to create new content that hasn’t been seen before?“  And I think it’s going to be about aggregating all of those different creative components – After Effects is omnivorous and can take in anything and that is AEs superpower. From things that are in After Effects happening right now that will become more and more important, I see more and more people not doing only Video Export, but writing out animations as code – and getting more toward a real time dynamic format. But that’s the coming years.

When we think about 2040, let’s kill rendering. Nobody should ever wait for a progress bar ever again! And at Max, we will show you, how we can take the first steps toward that!

Und wie Victoria schon angekündigt hat – die Adobe MAX, die weltweit größte Kreativkonferenz, steht in den Startlöchern und wartet darauf, die Kreativen mit den neuesten Updates aus dem Adobe-Universum zu versorgen.

Nach zwei Jahren ist endlich wieder Adobe MAX – live in Los Angeles geben sich in zahlreichen Workshops und Vorträgen von über 300 namhaften Speaker*innen Kreative und Promis die Klinke in die Hand.

– Virtuell kann man kostenlos dabei sein – hier gehts zur Anmeldung! –

Vom 18.-20. Oktober wird Adobe im Rahmen der MAX eine Vielzahl spannender News und Sneak Peeks zu den neuesten Innovationen der Creative Cloud präsentieren – darunter natürlich auch Neuerungen für Premiere Pro. In diesem Jahr findet das wichtigste Event der Kreativbranche das erste Mal hybrid statt und wer es nicht nach L.A. schafft, kann die MAX kostenlos als virtuelle Online-Veranstaltung von überall aus verfolgen.

Wer sich die angeteaserten Neuigkeiten aus dem Interview anschauen will, der sollte sich die „Sneaks“ zu Gemüte führen – Comedian Kevin Hart führt durchs Programm, wenn die  neuen Technologien vorgestellt werden. Bei den Sessions gibt es eine eigenen Kategorie für „Video, Audio, Motion“ – unter anderem mit Speaker*innen wie Valentina Vee, Ian Robinson (Creative 111), Hallease Narvaez (Creative Director, Stumblewell) und vielen mehr.  Hier ein Überblick über die After Effects Sessions