AFTER EFFECTS WISH LIST (Prior to Sept 09)

i wish a cleaned up, logical Forum.

actually it works somehow, but this is just a mess for my opinion.

any Joomla or phpBB generated forum is easier to understand and gives more usability and interaction than this one.

all this "quickt-edit-help" is very kind, but it does not help anyone to post a clean structured message.

the font is amazingly hard to read, this forum is not a newspaper, ok!?

it's just horrible. just like i said it already a hundred times before.

but hey, all in all, i have a spell checker.

sigh*

thanks josh townsend

for reply .

I`am gonna look for this plug-in

thanks again

"PLEASE - a simple dedicated preference page for AE's defult setting when interpreting imported video files."

I hate that my 24pa files have to interpreted now. Please fix this.

"The new CS4 curves adjustment in Photoshop has added a bunch of new features that are very useful (the best in my opinion is two little numeric fields where you can type in directly the value that you'd like) These need to come to AE ASAP. "

AGREED this would be SOOOOO useful.

64 BIT Native PLEASE :)

My #1 feature request:

PLEASE ADD A SIMPLE NLE to AFTER EFFECTS.

With CS4 and my new quad core I can play full res 1080 dvcprohd (p2) without dropping frames (when no FX are applied of course).

A simple NLE added to AFTER EFFECTS would make it a KILLER APP.

No new features except maybe a Media Browser like Premiere has, a simple NLE and 64bit Native. Perfect.

#2
Also, of course, native 3d import would be cool or at least Extruded 3-D Text.

I use After effect software in my school for 3d composing,
and the software is great-the best so far,but also have small weaknesses

for example :

1.adobe after effect can`t open m2ts file format.

that file is now popular and many people have problem to edit their video files.....
does adobe think to improve than soon and when.......

because I saving money and planing to buy legal Adobe After Effect software ,after I finish 3d shool to edit my one video files...
this is very important to me.

2.After Effect don`t have time stop watch in Effect>wire removal
when you work in Removal style also don`t have time stopwatch to remember ``Displace`` or ``dispalce horizontal``,``Fade``, ...,thickness``......etc

3.Under Animation>track motion>....when you track motion with one tracker is good ,but if you wanna track more then one tracker and hit play,all tracker roll again togethet without saving first tracker.

meny thank to reading all this and i hope for reply

Marko

I wish all the best

Can we finally get a b-spline for masks?! This is standard in other compositing programs. I love AE, but it's really annoying and expensive to have to get two pieces of software to do the same job.

Excelent requests! Many of your requests have been already asked since ages but the engineers did not even look into it, shame!
Be shure writing this request directly to adobe, otherwise these little dreams will never come true.
I can't wait for CS5 an how much adobe does listen to users, for now our post production facilities (about 120 AE seats) will not upgrade to CS4 because at the moment it just would be a waste of money.

My huge new year's wish list! I'm a CS3 user so I don't know if any of these have been implemented in CS4...

Masks & Roto:
- Per-vertex feathering on masks/shape layers. I don't want to use a plugin for this - it should be part of the masks interface using a checkbox to activate (displaying the secondary hull) and deactivate
- Access to individual mask points, even if it's just through expressions (I know you can get at them through scripts already). But being able to pick-whip the actual mask point would be cool
- Hotkey or shortcut to view current layer's masks as white-on-black to better evaluate feathering and motion blur

Compositing:
- Ability to use a layer post-effects/transforms/masks in compound effects - e.g. displacement map - to avoid the need to precompose (I don't care if there's a restriction saying the source layer must be below the effected layer in the stack). A checkbox tells the effect whether to use the layer's source, or the processed layer
- Ability to change the render order within a layer by dragging and dropping, just like you can already do with effects. Sometimes I might want my mask to process after transform (with the mask's own transform not being affected by the layer's transform, of course!)
- Use one layer as a track-matte for many layers. Currently the only ways of doing this are to either duplicate the matte for each layer you want to matte, or precomp the target layers together (not ideal if they're not meant to be together in the stack)
- Grouping layers within the stack is a useful idea as presented elsewhere, as an alternative to precomping, with adjustment layers within the group only affecting the layers in that group
- Paint gets rather unwieldy with many strokes. How about a raster-based system that ditches the overhead of recording every vector stroke and just lets you paint frame-by-frame? (keeping the current system for legacy/write-on effects of course!)

General/UI:
- 64-bit
- Source video playback = not using RAM preview. So slow and unnecessary. I know AE can deal with many different types of source footage, but it should be able to automatically conform on import to a disk-cached format it's happy to play back in realtime in the source window (and for that matter, using it while you work, reverting to the actual source for rendering only).
- Scopes - vectorscope and waveform monitor at least (plus a 3-colour histogram). Overlaying like in Fusion would be super cool
- The ability to have a user-defined split of A&B views. What the A&B views are though is another matter (probably different comps)!
- Thumbnail views of source/comps within the project panel with the ability to scrub through them in-situ and stack/unstack image sequences (a bit like a Flame desktop). This could be implemented using code already built for Bridge.
- Talking of which, integrate Bridge directly into the apps, so you can browse for footage directly.
- Biggie - a server-based project database/management component for larger projects, so you can check-out at comp level for collaborative projects!
- Ability to set bit-depth on a per-comp basis, with the default being set at project level
- Pass-through of expression controls from layers of a precomp to the parent comp - essentially creating a "gizmo" as Nuke calls it. The hard part is instancing the precomp, so if I've got multiple copies in the parent comp, I can control each one separately. This would be an amazing feature IMO!
- A graph editor similar to that in Maya, in its own space so you can also see the timeline

In-built Plugins:
- Histogram shown on Curves control, like in Photoshop. Also, it's about time things like this scaled with the Effect Controls panel. 256 pixels width for Curves is too small
- For colour correction plugins (curves, levels, hue/sat), the ability to use eyedroppers to sample black/white/mid/hue
- Corner-pin needs overhauling (although I suppose you could just buy Red Giant Warp).
- OpenGL accelerated mesh-warp. The current one is sooooo slow.

3D stuff:
- 3D extrusion on text and shape layers (requested here many times already!)
- 3D Grid (like you get in the perspective view of a 3D app)
- A floating comp camera. I HATE that you have to create a camera just to set up your 3D scene. Surely as soon as you toggle a layer's 3D switch, an invisible camera should automatically be created that allows you to navigate the scene (just like in all 3D apps). You should be able to render from it too, if you like!
- The unified camera tool in CS4 is a step in the right direction, but I'd prefer to just hold down ALT (or even "C" - perhaps user defined...) and use my 3-button mouse to move the camera around
- Creation of basic geometry such as spheres and cylinders that can be used for projection or just basic texture mapping
- Default camera to have no point-of-interest

Happy new year all!

The new CS4 curves adjustment in Photoshop has added a bunch of new features that are very useful (the best in my opinion is two little numeric fields where you can type in directly the value that you'd like) These need to come to AE ASAP.

Scripting:
- ability to open comps/timelines without hacks

- notification when the user hits render - project-wide, not per renderQ item

- access to all text character attributes (size, font, leading, etc.) individually

- full mouse support for all UI objects, not just clickable thingees

compositing:
- ability to limit adjustment layers to only reach down a certain number of layers

- group layers without pre-comping. Would be good for organization, letting certain layers move together without duplicating lights and cameras in multiple pre-comps, and could do away with the need for the adjustment layer limit suggestion I just made

- better splines in graph editor. I want to edit splines exactly like Illustrator paths. Some of the weird bounces, and discontinuities AE does now make no sense.

- hitting 'play' when a ram preview is available should play as fast as a ram preview.

- drop shadow angle control in layer effects should spin in the same direction as other angle controls (like drop shadow effect, for instance).

- better 3D app support - let me load lights, cameras and object motions (if not the objects themselves) from all the main 3D programs

rendering:
- cs4 render panel has made the 'estimated time remaining' display very hard to see without making the render panel very very wide. This is too important to hide.

- add a "render in background' button to render panel enabling user to get back to animating quickly without mucking about with scripts or whatnot.