AFTER EFFECTS WISH LIST (Prior to Sept 09)

[Andrew Yoole]

AFTER EFFECTS WISHLIST

What features would you like to see implemented in After Effects? New ideas for plugins? Interface changes? Post 'em here!

Let's keep bug identification to individual posts, as these will probably be addressed more readily. Let's use this thread for specific ideas about ways that AE can be improved and expanded.

These Forums are for users, not Adobe employees, so don't forget to also fill in an  Adobe feature request form.

To view the Wish List posts prior to 2008, look here.

[_juha87_]

It is really nice to have imagineersystems' mocha for ae in cs4 version, i hope that we will see in the future also on other softwares from imagineersystems for ae with full functional/seamless export/import features. Example http://www.imagineersystems.com/products/mokey/ imagineersystems' mokey sounds really nice software for ae ;)

[_Nicholas_Karlovich_]

I would love to be able to "link" keyframes (or a number of keyframes) to the ends of layer bars in the timeline window. That way, when I adjust the layer cutoff points, I'll know that my "fade-in" opacity keyframes are still at the right point without having to display all of the keys and re-adjust everything.

[Andrew Yoole]

^ I really like that idea! The ability to "time-lock" keyframes to a layer, a layer handle, or overall comp position, would be really handy.

So, for example, right clicking selected keyframe(s) and choosing "Lock Keyframe" opens a dialog box with checkbox options:

Lock keyframe(s) relative to:

Layer start handle
Layer end handle
Layer source timecode
Composition timecode

As a workaround in the meantime, however, you might want to try the "Fade In+Out" animation presets, which uses expressions to automate opacity fades at the start and end of a layer.

[_temedia_]

It would be much easier to have a "preference page" for "default interpretation" settings rather than have to manually edit the interpretation file which is not only difficult but very dangerous for beginner users.

Most users would generally work with the same codec/field/pixel aspect over & over. But it is so difficult to get AE to change its default settings, you have to quit AE for starters! Then its anyones guess what editing to do in the interpretations file. Perhaps then you can change AE's settings without having to quit, wow, that would be good going for a 10th generation program

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

[_Steve_Patterson_]

I'd like to see a way to simplify expressions in AE based on the "set driven key" functionality in Maya. Basically, it's the same content that expressions offer currently, but you could apply them through a tangible interface/GUI experience (a new floating palette). Expressions are a powerful tool in AE, but becoming fluent in the language is pretty hard to get for many folks. If you haven't used "set driven hey" in Maya, or something similar in another app, the concept would be to define behavior between 2 or more parts via a GUI that would show the various properties of those layers. For example, loading "solid 1" as the driver, and "solid 2" as the driven. Then you can set defining keys of the new relationship. For instance, you key their initial position (creating a sub-class of keyframe---perhaps you'd be able to see these in a separate timeline-ish window), and then you alter both positions, and create a second keyframe, which would define the change. Then anytime you moved the driver, the driven would reflect the behavior.

It really wouldn't be anything that expressions can't do now, and it would still be beneficial to learn javascript for maximum flexibility, but it might be a handy thing to have lying around.

[_Steve_Patterson_]

The ability to group together certain puppet pins on the same layer.

[_yanez_salvador_]

I would like a broadcast video output for Quicktime movies.
Expecially for DV codec too. Often i need to compare the rendered video with my timeline, and i have to lanch premiere in order to do this.

I would play Quicktimes rendered movies on my footage windows, and compare it with my timeline keyframes, without switch to other applications.

[_yanez_salvador_]

I would like a broadcast video output for Quicktime movies.
Especially for DV codec too. Often I need to compare the rendered video with my timeline, and I have to launch premiere in order to do this.

I would play Quicktimes rendered movies on my footage windows, and compare it with my timeline keyframes, without switch to other applications.

[David_Wigforss-Hv1BNN]

"The ability to group together certain puppet pins on the same layer. "

Hey Steve. You mean to create a hierarchy? You can already do this with nulls and expressions.

Expression on pin positions would be something such as:
L = thisComp.layer("Forearm"); fromComp(L.toComp(L.anchorPoint))

[Guest]

I'd love to see the ability to animate preComps like text Layers. For example: I break up a logo in Illustrator so each element (letters, shapes) are in their own layer. Then I'd bring that ai file into AE and adjust the layer order based on the animation order, the top layer animates first and so on.. Then I'd bring the ai comp into a new comp and I'd be able to pick an animation type for the transformation, just like I would on a text layer, and of course there would be a "enable per-layer 3d".

[Guest]

Earlier Beta-Releases to everyone for testing before shipping the major release.
Therefore the developers have more time to correct/fix issues and implement "forgotten" feature requests before they shoot out one update after another or just heading for the next paid upgrade.

The Community - therefore all users, and ONLY the users of Adobe products are the key to success of Adobe as a company!
Want to keep users? Start collaborating fast and hard. we´ll pay you then every dollar you deserve.

Hopefuly Mr. Shantanu Narayen does recognizes this in a respectful manner and reconsider how Adobe software will be sold - resectively balancing the prices for software - in different countries.

I do not believe that it´s right to pay more bucks if someone in europe downloading purchased products from the US server.

Also, he should consider IF giving away FULLY functional Trial versions, all 3rd party plugins & apps (especially new ones) should also WORK in Trial mode. We barely do not care if a 3rd party company will not allow their software running in trial mode. It´s your problem cooperating with such companies, not our problem, therefore keep your excuses for yourself internally.

If Adobe believes that their solutions make them a monopoly of power in this branch, they should lean back with a good glass of wine and take a very hard look into the future. why? because many High-end Software developers who sold their software in the past for about Dollar 10K and upwards smashed their prices dramatically into ground.
The tendency is rising furthermore and for many users it´s just a snap away to switch to another application that meets the specs of taste and usability. The world is getting smaller every day.

good nite and good luck...

PS: Heres a little Math. Prices compared at the Adobe Online Store.

Master Collection CS4 Full

German

Boxed:
3.569,00 EUR = 4,483.36 USD (roundup)

Download:
3.629,00 EUR = 4,560.32 USD (roundup)

English/US

Boxed & Download:
2.499,00 USD = 1,988.09 EUR

Don´t you think that somethings wrong here?

[Andrew Yoole]

The question of Adobe's International Pricing discrepancy was also raised after the launch of CS3, and has been discussed in these forums in that context.

This message from Adobe in May last year:

___________________________________________________________________

Here are some concrete examples of factors that make costs higher in Europe compared to North America.

It costs Adobe 5 times more to manufacture and manage inventory in Europe because:
*We must maintain different skus for each language version to support different labeling requirements, support information, and sales requirements.
*We maintain smaller quantities per language, in keeping with market sizes, which increases costs for printing, inventory management, and inventory disposal.
* The costs associated with our value-added reseller channels are 25% higher.
* We maintain 2.5 times as many field marketing employees in Europe as in North America to support our creative business at a certain level of quality across local markets. However, the revenue per employee is smaller, so the overall costs per unit of revenue is 4:1 in Europe compared to North America.
* Variable marketing expenses are 46% higher.
* Development costs are approximately $2.5$3 million per language for each of the 14 languages Adobe Creative Suite supports.

We cannot provide specific numbers, but these percentages and multiples capture real differences.

Its natural to compare pricing and pricing uplift across similar companies, but in this case, the comparison can be deceptive. The value of different products to customersand the costto companies to develop, sell, and support those productscan vary significantly from product to product, and manufacturer to manufacturer. Adobe does not develop our pricing for Europe or the rest of world by simply applying an uplift to the US pricing. As stated earlier, we develop our pricing by weighing customer research and our costs of doing business. We cant comment on the methods that other companies use to set their prices for Europe and the rest of world.

Its understandable why customers would expect to be able to purchase the same product at the same price when ordering and downloading directly from the Adobe Web site at www.adobe.com. Today, however, we still sell the majority of our products through traditional retail channels, and we optimize our pricing for that way of doing business. We depend on our retail partners in local markets to help us reach as many customers as possible, and we have a policy of not undercutting them on price. In addition, the Creative Suite 3 applications are large and require significant time to download. For many customers, online downloads will not serve as a reasonable purchase option for some time. However, as bandwidth increases and customer expectations change, well need to investigate ways to optimize our pricing for this approach.

Lastly, some higher regional costs will remain regardless of the method of purchase. For example, customers will still read about our products through local press to whom we reach out; they will meet local Adobe sales people who conduct seminars, participate in user groups, and visit large customers; and they will rely on support resources that Adobe makes available in these markets. All of these efforts impact the business costs of securing the sale, whether that sale is delivered online or in a box.

Customer service agents do not really have time to browse external websites, but I hope this deals with the questions you asked.

Should you require any further information, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Yours Sincerely,

Joel Williams
Adobe Customer Service

[joshtownsend]

I don't care about new features just make the program work better. Why can't AE play footage without FX as easily as Premiere.

If Adobe concentrated on adding a NLE, the ability to import 3d and giving us photoshop quality color correct plug-in's the app would rule the world.

[Guest]

Thanks Andrew,

but, you know, what does the *beep* interests me or others what Adobes problems are distributing their software in other languages?

I just have a number: Eur. 1.600,00 i have to pay on top, and thats just from the price Adobe claims as "from 3.6xx,xx EUR" for Master Collection somewhat, means not "by", it means "starts f r o m"

ey, this is crazy man!

[_Steve_Patterson_]

Thanks, David!
I'll look into it.

[joshtownsend]

My wish. Add a simple NLE into After Effects. Maybe premiere running inside AE.

That would be a Killer APP.

[_Omer_Wodnizki_]

Importing Flash projects into After Effects.

I want to be able to import a FLA as a comp like I do with Photoshop

[_rich_helvey_]

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.

[_invisiblerabbit_]

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.

[Christian Lett]

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!

[Guest]

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.

[_redmike_]

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.

[_markonatto_]

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

[joshtownsend]

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.

[joshtownsend]

"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 :)