Posts Tagged ‘after effects’

Adobe Creative Suite 5.5: Worth the Upgrade?

Adobe Creative Suite 5.5: Make Adobe Money Edition

Note the "CS5.5" tag, because it's the exact same box as CS5.

Adobe has recently released version 5.5 of its Creative Suite packages. Having recently upgraded to CS5 from a mixed CS3/CS4 environment, I had to ask myself if it’s worth both the trouble and expense to upgrade at this point.

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After Effects: Fullscreen Preview

If you actually bother preemptively reading your software documentation, you may have already known this, but this is a huge time-saver over having to render test movies for my HDTV.

At work, I’m using a 27″ 1080p monitor/television as my secondary monitor. We use a model that has a similar color profile for presentations, so using this screen as a preview screen is essential. Otherwise, we’d have to keep our presentation displays unpacked and hooked up to a computer, transfer files, and so on. I won’t get into (more) details, but suffice to say it would be a royal pain.

You can stretch to the edges, but there's still a border.

Even with this setup, I’ve been rendering drafts to an mp4 file and running a video player fullscreen on the HDTV (which matches the production environment). This is still a step I’d rather not have to do, so finally today I did some searching.

‘Lo, and behold! There is a way.

According to Adobe documentation, Ctrl+\ (+\ on Mac) does the following:

Resize application window or floating window to fit screen. (Press again to resize window so that contents fill the screen.)

Since my composition window is on the second monitor already, I pressed Ctrl+\ twice.

Ah, fullscreen goodness.

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Get Trapcode Plugins to Show in CS4

Had a bit of an issue with After Effects CS4 not showing older Trapcode plugins. After installation, the Trapcode folder was simply not present. Specifically, I had issues with SoundKeys 1.12, Particular 1.5, and 3D Stroke 2.04.

Once you install these plugins, they will install to your Program Files\Trapcode. Copy 3D Stroke and Particular *.aex files into Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CS4\Support Files\Plug-ins\Effects, and SoundKeys into the parent folder (Plug-ins). Restart After Effects.

For other Trapcode plugins, I haven’t tried to install them yet, so I don’t know.

I believe the newest versions of Trapcode plugins all install to the correct folder.

Update (2010-10-26): I’m probably late to the game on this, but older Trapcode plugins will not work in After Effects CS5. This version requires a 64-bit operating system and plugins, so you will now have to re-purchase your Trapcode plugins. Oh yeah, and Trapcode was bought by Red Giant, so you’ll have to buy it from them.

I feel like Adobe just gave me the finger. I guess the assumption is that if you’re working on video, you can afford it? Even with Photoshop I got a 32-bit version WITH the 64-bit (though I use the 64-bit one).

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Adobe CS4 Issues and Mini-Review

Adobe has decided to make more of a commitment to customer support. They are teaming up with a global service provider, so I assume that means outsourced phone support. The best place to take your change requests is the Adobe Feature Request form.

This is a really, really long post. It’s long both because the Adobe Creative Suite 4 is vast and encompasses many software packages, but also because I found a great deal of things to complain about. While complaining is nothing new for me, finding this many problems with a mature software product is.

In this post, first I will detail the problems I encountered using the CS4 products, some action items for Adobe, state a few positives, and an overall conclusion. I do not intend to review all of the new features (which are many).

Note that this post is about the Windows version. I believe many of these issues are not present on a Mac system, but I can’t make any assumptions, because I do not own a Mac, nor have I used CS4 on a Mac.

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