This ability to playback an entire sequence at full resolution rather than having to watch it in snippets allows an effects artist to be more creative and more productive presenting the true timing of what's being created without having one's attention broken by waiting for something to cache. Now with CS5, nearly 50 seconds of similar footage can be loaded into memory and scrubbed in realtime. DPX sequence output at 2048x1024 from a 4K Red One source could only be cached for less than five seconds in the 32-bit environment of AE CS4. That little green bar that usually chases itself across the Timeline, rendering only a small section of the shot at a time, now can extend a lot further. The magic that the 64-bit environment gets you is in caching. Upgrading to a 64-bit only pipeline means that every third party plug-in also needs to be updated, most of which require additional cost. Maxing out RAM on a primary workstation can quickly spoil an artist, and it's likely that projects will be constructed that can only be rendered on machines with equal specs. Keep in mind however, as with multiple cores, when utilizing a renderfarm, it's all for one, one for all. That being said, when working on HDTV or digital cinema projects there are distinct advantages to literally maxing out the machine with 96GB or even 192GB RAM. While this is an amazing machine to work on, you will still see improvements to your workflow from previous versions on any multi-core machine with more than 4GB of memory. Testing for this review was on a 12-core Hewlett-Packard Z800 with 24GB of RAM. A way to save the memory configurations as presets would be a helpful addition to the current process. While the online Help links to information explaining how to find this perfect equilibrium, it would be great if the next update of After Effects did more to walk the user through the process of configuring these memory settings, or analyzed the system and took care of the entire process on its own. However, depending on the system and the kind of work you're doing, better performance will come from balancing out the system by assigning the optimal amount of cores with as much memory as possible to those cores. A simple checkbox activates additional cores to “Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously,” and most users will instinctively spread out the workload to as many processors as they have available. The settings you choose under “Memory & Multiprocessing” are now more important than ever before, and make a world of difference in determining the worth in spending the money to upgrade your computer. When you launch AE CS5, your first stop should be in the Preferences dialogue. Realize that fewer cores with more memory is better than more cores with less memory. Purchase the best machine with as much RAM as you can afford. However making this jump is not just about upgrading to CS5, chances are you will want to update your hardware to multi-core machines running Windows 7 or Snow Leopard on the Mac. Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere Pro are now the three key 64-bit applications in Adobe's CS5 Production Premium that will run larger 2K and 4K projects in an integrated workflow. Both After Effects CS5 and Premiere Pro were completely rewritten to take advantage of the virtually unlimited memory access that you can get in a 64-bit work environment. So what does After Effects moving to 64-bit really mean? It means that you can do a lot of things more efficiently than before, and it also means that you can do things that you simply could not do before. 3D LUTS: only two formats supported as of now. Memory allocation should be automatic or at least have presets for different configurations Requires you to rethink your entire pipeline workflow: hardware, operating system, software, plug-ins, renderfarm. Capability of getting shots done faster being more creative One of the most significant upgrades ever made to AE Migration to a 64-bit application, 3D LUTS and the roto brush are just some of the new tools that will make shot production easier. With version CS5, Adobe After Effects finally has an upgrade with features for visual effects artists.
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