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| Unlike others who posted as soon as the NDA was lifted, I slept in this morning and am late to the party. But I did want to point out that there are so many new features in CS6 as to make this upgrade a no brainer. I only concentrated on AE6 during the beta, and used it extensively in production. Simply put, there are so many new features I barely got to try them all. Aside from the sexy "high profile" additions (3D camera tracker, 3D extrusions, ray tracing, etc), one of the most useful (to me) is the new persistent cache. This stores your cached rendered layers on a drive and keeps them available from session to session. No need to re-render everything the next day to generate a quick ram preview-- they load automatically from the cache and your ready to go. And comps that may be common to multiple projects carry their cache with them-- a huge time saver in practice. Also, every third party plug in I use regularly works fine in AE6 (a few have been updated to do so). One more plus- the arbitrary category limit of the effects menu has been lifted, so you don't end up with dozens of filters dumped into some unorganized category called "other". I often work with teams of freelance AE artists, all on different versions of AE. AE6 does have a Save As CS5.5 feature, so you can share projects with others (or go backwards if you do run into a plug in issue). From AE5.5 you can save again back to AE5, in effect allowing to save back two complete revs. Obviously, the newest features like 3D don't travel backwards to older versions. Kudos to the AE team on this release. I can personally attest to how hard they worked to bring it to life. Rob Birnholz Absolute Motion Graphics, Inc. Longwood, Florida www.absolutemotiongraphics.com (sent from a mobile device) |
