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| On 12/01/2014, at 9:52 AM, Todd Kopriva <kopriva@adobe.com> wrote: > a very important question for every After Effects user, from product manager Steve Forde: > http://adobe.ly/1exI6tI I don't feel strongly enough to answer the actual question on the forum, but I thought I would share a thought on this list. After Effects holds an interesting position in the market because it straddles 2 different disciplines - design, and vfx compositing. My initial reaction is that improving the raw performance of the application will mostly affect the visual fx / compositors more than the designers. From my experience, designers tend to design at their own pace and aren't limited by the raw horsepower of the machine they're on. I often think about how great designs stay great over time, even though they may have been created using vastly different technology. If a design isn't great is isn't because the computer was too slow, or didn't have enough ram, or the designer didn't own the right plug in. I love the typography and graphic design from the Bauhaus period, it's still an inspiration today and it was all done pre-World War 2. In the book "24 Hour Party People" there's a reference to the famous (almost godlike now) UK designer Peter Saville designing his layouts using strips of cardboard. When it comes to motion graphics, some of the most influential and highly referenced pieces were created using older technology and it can be a shock to realise how old they are. The titles to Seven were done in 1995, the green digital rain in the Matrix dates from 1999. The famous interface scenes in Minority Report date from 2002, the opening sequence in "Stranger than fiction" was 2006. It's a shock to work out the maths and realise that Seven is almost 20 years old, Minority Report is about 12 years old and so on, yet the graphics in these films are still hailed as benchmarks today. Although those films no doubt had impressive budgets and timeframes, it wasn't the technology or the speed of the computers that made them great. I really don't think that good design is restricted by processing power in the same way compositing is. So basically- I'm all for a faster, more powerful application. I'll never say no to faster rendering and faster performance. But having a faster render engine or a multi-threaded application won't automatically make designs better. Workflow tools, interface improvements, improved collaboration tools and so on - they're the sorts of things that help everyone do their job better, whereas making the application simply faster isn't going to have such a wide reaching effect. Just thinking out loud… -Chris |
