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MADE by Lundahlwork

Initial thoughts on Adobe CC, AE + Story

By October 15, 2013No Comments

So,

I’ve been using most of Adobe CC extensively for video & VFX production since I announced including it in my pipeline in an earlier post.

So I thought I’d write a little about it.

AE_screen

I was extremely excited about the 3D camera tracker in After effects. When it works it produces excellent solves. However I recently sat on a production with other partners included and I thought to use After Effects as my main tracker. For some reason it didn’t work at all. My partners did an excellent job at shooting the material in Highres, well lit and with no weird pans. But AE just could not handle it to my surprise. However I did solve that pretty quickly with just manipulating the sequence a bit. Another thing that also annoyed the hell out of me is that you can’t export your solve to any other package than Cinema 4D. I know they’ve partnered up with Maxon and want to push Cinema 4D. But in my world of production, cinema 4D lite just isn’t enough for the heavy duty 3D work I’m doing with my production company. And then you might argue that I should invest in the full version of Cinema. I could consider that, but comparing Cinema with Maya, I feel safer betting my money on Autodesk since I’ve spent pretty much my whole career working with their products and my pipeline is built around that. So I had to go with another solution for that and redo the work. Cinema with the R15 just released (or about to get released) seems to be a strong competitor to Maya. Maybe I’ll give that a try later on when I have more time to explore. Still, I want to be able to export my AE 3D work to any package I choose. Hope Adobe changes this soon. It’s pretty obvious that Adobe is trying to force people to stay within the Adobe ecosystem without ever needing to step outside. That is great and I see a lot of benefits from it. But the problem is that the complexity of peoples pipelines just doesn’t make it possible for them to use Adobe only product.

Another part of the Adobe CC suite is Adobe Story. I used to use CeltX for all my writing but have now switched over. I haven’t finalized a script yet so I’ll keep this brief. Overall I do love it. I do not regret moving over. But with all the great features marketed by Adobe things still aren’t perfect. At first I find the writing part a bit sluggish. However after a few updates it feels like it has gotten better. Better, but not perfect. Could this be due to the fact that it’s an adobe air based product? Something else that’s bothering me is that I do alot of writing on the go, either on my Sony android tablet or my Lumia Windows phone. With CeltX there is at least an app available I can use on the android device. That is not the case with Adobe story. So for any writing while traveling I need to use something else and then later copy everything over. I am however soon replacing my android tablet and will probably end up with the new Surface 2 pro coming out soon. It’s running the full version of Windows 8.1 and that should solve the problem. Other than that I haven’t really gotten to the point of using some of the other features that seems great. So I’ll have to save that one for another post in the future.

/M

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