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When will ae use Metal?
Let me try to clarify:
What David showed on the Apple stage was a demonstration of the potential that Metal has for After Effects, as well as for other Adobe creative applications. In his role leading our R&D group, he has committed us to pursuing performance in general as well as specifically with Metal on the Mac platform. But that is not a statement about specific timing of when these features will be publicly available, nor is it a promise about exactly what parts of the application will be
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We are currently exploring various technologies for GPU acceleration, and Metal is one possibility, but we have made no commitment to any specific GPU acceleration technology at this time.
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Whatever you go with, please make it one that doesn't depend upon a proprietary technology from a single card manufacturer. Mac users get vey little choice in graphics cards and Apple as of late has been completely ignoring Nvidia.
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I agree with this. Currently, After Effects DOESN'T support the latest MacBook Pro 2015 (AMD Radeon R9 M370X GPU), which is ridiculous. I hope you guys at Adobe will come out with a Metal solution soon.
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I have the same "problem" with the new macbook pro mid2015 and the GPU AMD Radeon R9 M370X 2048 MB. I guess needs some update. My old iMac early 2009 with nvidia GPU support that just cause cuda. Hope you guys will come with an about soon
p.s also illustrator have compatibility issue with the new macbook pro (mid2015) and the multi GPU (I've turn the GPU auto switching of and is working fine)
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AMD cards are supported by After Effects. If they weren't supported, you wouldn't be able to use it period. There's a lot of misunderstanding about this issue.
The only disadvantage I've noticed to having an AMD GPU is that Raytracing is not GPU accelerated. So, if you are using AE's 3D tools just use the Classic 3D Renderer...not Raytracing. Most heavy 3D work can easily be done in C4D or Element 3D and make AE's raytracing/3D options a poor choice on projects. I have the newest Mac Pro and have not found this to be an issue whatsoever. It still kills my old Mac Pro in terms of RAM previews and overall rendering.
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My setup kind of randomly supports it. Sometimes it comes up with 'Display Acceleration Disabled' in Ae and 'Mercury Playback Engine Software Only' in AME. Feels like After Effects can't use the AMS Radeon Pro Vega II in situations where other software has used it first. When it is not enabled in Ae, even a low resolution, prerendered timeline won't plat at 25fps. Movies hat would preview without any problem on a Power Macintosh G3 in 1999
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umm don't lie you guys did at the apple keynote. You guys showed after effects and illustrator in the metal demonstration.
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What was shown on the Apple stage was the result of one experiment.
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Todd you're embarrassing your self. This what was said, "So Adobe is committed to bringing metal to all of its Mac OS creative cloud applications such as illustrator and after effects as I showed you today as well as Photoshop and premier pro. So we are very excited to see what metal can do for our creative cloud users."
I Guess you didn't get the memo that they actually did make a commitment.
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I am the person who makes the commitments for After Effects. The person who did the demonstration was a member of of our engineering team demonstrating the results of an experiment.
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Well, I agree with barubin that if your engineers are saying Adobe is committed to Metal publicly on Apple's event, then is backing off elsewhere, it doesn't send a very clear message to users.
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I certainly agree that the engineer who spoke on the Apple stage sent a confusing message. At this point, the best that I can do---as the leader of the After Effects team---is to clarify the reality, which I have done above on this thread.
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why wouldn't you use metal? It seems to make ae faster.
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As Todd said, they are looking at it and other options. I am guessing that they will not commit to going down the rabbit hole again like they did with NVIDIA and CUDA without considering all options. That is the only thing that makes good business sense. It's awfully hard for enthusiastic users to accept the fact that software companies must consider all costs when designing their products. If they are great at research and development but bad at business they won't be around to keep the lights on for very long.
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I think the confusing message was sent merely by Adobe's presence on stage during the keynote, using specific software in their demo rather than making it a clear point that it was just an exercise. Generally when a major software company goes onstage to demonstrate something, it's for the purpose of advertising upcoming features. But in this case, it was obviously mutually beneficial for Apple and Adobe to garner interest in their products by banking off eachothers pedigree. All of this to say that I'm sure if it was up to you (Todd), no one from Adobe would be demoing unfinished work on someone else's stage. The fact that you regularly correspond with your user base is enough to evidence your commitment to the program.
Good move focusing on non brand specific tech for future gpu implementation.
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Dear Adobe,
When you go on stage and make statements like this, you are influencing the purchasing decision of thousands of people who are making a living using your products. As someone who just invested $8,000 into a new Mac Pro based partly on the fact that technologies like Metal will enable better productivity on the Mac platform, it's a kick in the gut when you guys come out months later and say, "Just kidding!!" You deserve to be called out on this big time, because it's misleading and nothing about your presentation at WWDC gave the impression that you were just "kicking the tires" with the technology.
An apology would be nice, rather than making it look like we're the ones who didn't understand your message.
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There are several aspects of this problem.
First, I think it was a very bad choice of words at the keynote.
Second, people forget that After Effects is a small part of a very big product. Creative cloud is a very integrated system where small change in one part can snowball big problems in others. For instance you can replace footage on the Premiere timeline with AE composition and Pemiere will be rendering that part thru AE. And you have to make sure everything works properly on both ends. So does that mean Premiere has to get Metal support too? What happens if it doesn't?
Third. Just in the current version for the first time since AE was developed the core was reworked. AE now has real multi–threading where for instance Render and UI seat on different threads. So now Adobe team has to figure out how implement further multi–threading for the rendering. That means more problems to figure out what to do with multi processor rendering, GPU acceleration and such.
Forth. Somebody posted before asking not to choose proprietary technology because Mac users have problems with NVIDIA cards. Well, Metal is proprietary Apple's technology, so then the whole PC market would have problems. And that market segment is a way bigger!
And you can continue this list with more and more problems....
But the bottom line is that Adobe has a very hard problem to solve and I hope they will take their time to do it right!
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"There are several aspects of this problem.
First, I think it was a very bad choice of words at the keynote.
Second, people forget that After Effects is a small part of a very big product. Creative cloud is a very integrated system where small change in one part can snowball big problems in others. For instance you can replace footage on the Premiere timeline with AE composition and Pemiere will be rendering that part thru AE. And you have to make sure everything works properly on both ends. So does that mean Premiere has to get Metal support too? What happens if it doesn't?
Third. Just in the current version for the first time since AE was developed the core was reworked. AE now has real multi–threading where for instance Render and UI seat on different threads. So now Adobe team has to figure out how implement further multi–threading for the rendering. That means more problems to figure out what to do with multi processor rendering, GPU acceleration and such.
Forth. Somebody posted before asking not to choose proprietary technology because Mac users have problems with NVIDIA cards. Well, Metal is proprietary Apple's technology, so then the whole PC market would have problems. And that market segment is a way bigger!
And you can continue this list with more and more problems....
But the bottom line is that Adobe has a very hard problem to solve and I hope they will take their time to do it right!"
Well said, and I agree that Metal being a Mac only technology is limiting. BUT, I don't see a reason other than corporate interest for Adobe to ONLY develop for a magical GPU tech that is shared among both platforms. Surely they aren't simply porting the Mac version over from a master copy of the Windows version, so there has to be some platform specific development already in place. If Metal is the GPU tech that allows the highest number of current Mac systems to benefit, and DirectX, or whatever Windows is currently going with provides the most benefit for PCs, I see no reason why Adobe can't devote effort into developing for both. What I don't want to see is Adobe develop another GPU acceleration that requires me to not only have a high performance card, but one made by a specific GPU manufacturer, made within a certain timespan. And I don't want to see any new features withheld from any one platform or the other, simply because they only see it cost effective to develop for one technology at a time.
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Adobe is firmly committed to performance because it accelerates creativity - Adobe is also firmly committed to the Mac platform. We share as much as we can about the directions we’re exploring and will continue to try and set realistic expectations about when specific advancements will come to market. When we demonstrated what was possible, we made a clear statement - which I repeat here: "Adobe is committed to bringing Metal to all of its Mac OS Creative Cloud applications, such as Illustrator and After Effects I showed you today, as well as Photoshop and Premiere Pro. We are very excited to see what Metal can do for our Creative Cloud users."
David McGavran
Director of Engineering
Adobe Professional Audio and Video
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David and Todd, could you speak to each other internally before saying opposite declarations? Which of you guys should we believe now?
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Phil, I don't think the declarations are opposite. David said that "Adobe is committed to bringing Metal to all of its Mac OS Creative Cloud applications". what it means they work on it really hard. BUT, that doesn't mean that's the only way and it's a 100% done deal. They are doing research, building software, exploring different ways. "Metal" in particular is a part of that process.
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Todds on a power trip.
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Someone's getting fired