Thank you Maxon…hello Autograph. Not only free, but far better equipped than Adobe After Effects ever was and ever will be. After 30 years using, testing, and evangelizing AE with Adobe on the road at SCAD, NAB, and Siggraph there was a rift in the Force. The first thing I noticed after being on the beta team for a bit was that so many core issues always fell through the cracks. I’m talking about the way AE handled alpha channels, mattes, etc. I remember bringing up the topic of unifying how AE handles mattes, alphas, anything that could be piped in to alter a layer’s transparency. Andrew Kramer even chimed in seeing it as a viable idea, but it never went anywhere during my tenure on the beta team. Over a decade later they finally added it in the most elegant way possible, the way we had discussed it to begin with nearly a dozen years before. I guess they were too busy tweaking the rounded corners and overly-bolded text for the Adobe logo/not logo. Call it a middle-aged crisis, but it was far more serious than that.
Adobe was in free fall having an identity crisis as Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve killed Premiere, Affinity Photo killed Photoshop, Affinity Designer killed Illustrator, and Affinity Publisher killed InDesign. Well, not really killed, maimed is more like it. We waited…and waited with bated breath. We tried AE alternatives like Fusion and Blender’s compositing nodes, but motion design was missing in these compositing-centric fare. Things remained quiet for a while longer. Then we saw it: the light at the end of the tunnel. Adobe, distracted by its own greedy bloodlust, never saw it coming. The light got exponentially brighter by the second. It wasn’t some newly tooled Adobe abomination. Instead it was another train. A faster, stronger technology in the form of Autograph. Cue The Six Million Dollar Man music. I finally feel like we have access to a modernized version of Discreet Logic’s Flint/Flame/Inferno. I do miss Discreet’s desktop reels. It gave off a near tactile vibe of shuffling frames like a deck of cards. Magical.
“We waited…and waited with bated breath. We tried AE alternatives like Fusion and the like, but motion design was missing in the compositing-centric fare. Things remained quiet for a while longer. Then we saw it: the light at the end of the tunnel. Adobe never saw it coming. The light got exponentially brighter by the second. It wasn’t some newly tooled Adobe abomination. Instead it was another train. A faster, stronger, better app in the form of Autograph. Cue The Six Million Dollar Man theme music. Oh snap! It also fits into the Maxon One ecosystem.”
Adobe was never interested in core functionality. They kept adding sand bags to their failing levees. During the beta cycles we spent more time on the newly introduced dark mode than those discussions about matting I mentioned above. Instead they would add new features that really weren’t all that special. Features like “Brainstorm” that was really just a lazy way to approach alternative designs by adding randomized seeds creating gallery-style versions for the user to choose from. Then at one point they targeted heavy render effects adding a GPU rendering capability, but only for a handful of effects like Gaussian Blur.
I’d much rather use a system for compositing that has a solid, well rounded foundation. Then build on top of that. However, After Effects became bloated, unstable, and honestly during the post-CC years a complete train wreck. RAM Preview should have died decades ago yet it still hasn’t graduated beyond disk caching and the necessity to pre-render elements as we go when building complicated shots beyond ten layers to keep the process speedy. When I gave demos for conference attendees or my students I’d always focus on sharing how my comps actually got faster as I neared completion. Never grinding to a halt nor slowed to a snail’s pace, as was clear when I inherited someone’s project that was one comp with hundreds of layers and no precomps.
No true node graph ever saw the light of day either. There were third party versions of node view that barely scratched the surface of nodal compositing. Then there’s all of the legacy code riddled with expiring technology contracts built upon a prehistoric house of cards-style construction. We, as users, were even warned not to use older versions of AE due to these outdated contracts with third party technologies. Then there was Adobe deciding to not support all of the legacy QuickTime and other 32-bit output formats. Thankfully DaVinci Resolve elegantly resolves that issue. Just another good reason to ditch the mud hut conglomerate. Adobe bought it, stuck a “Guaranteed” sticker on the box, and sold it en masse. “Why would someone put a guarantee on a box? “Because they know all they sold you was a guaranteed piece of shit.” – Chris Farley as Tommy Boy, 1995.
The day I received an email from Adobe containing a questionnaire as to how they should begin charging monthly for the software was judgment day. Having been selected in the top ten during one of their Prerelease cycles felt great. Fast-forward a decade and Adobe closed the door on me. No more testing, and even ignored when I approached them to join the AE group. Adobe was different. I even witnessed feature requests that I had made over 13 years ago being touted by Adobe as new improvements. I never really understood why it took so long to add what I would call core fundamentals. Missing node view is still baffling.
They never seemed interested in adding a true nodal interface. I have a feeling it was too difficult to overhaul a system based solely on layers in vertical stacks to add it. So, as with many other user requests that never saw the light of day, Adobe left it to the third-party community to address their own software’s limitations. Then there was that one feature request that I borrowed from ElectricImage called Auto-keyframe. Something to me that seemed so simple to implement lived up to being the most confusing and “worst feature” according to their own product manager. So yeah, Auto-keyframe was my fault. But oh well…I haven’t used AE for awhile now. I shifted my focus to Affinity, Resolve, and Blender.
Now the circle is complete with Autograph. Making it free reminded me of the passionate folks behind Red Giant and Cinema4D. At first glance the first thing I realize is that Autograph reminds me more of a Flint, Flame or Inferno than AE. While the AE team has added 3D features, there are still workflow issues that remain leaving it in a state of disillusion and confusion. Autograph is a truly integrated system keeping broadcast designers and visual effects artists directly aligned with its core values and principles. I had a feeling a year ago that Maxon might either buy AE from Adobe or find an even better alternative. Autograph is modern, responsive, and forward-thinking. All I can say is that I need to wrap this up so I can get to it! While Adobe continues holding onto legacy code I’ll gladly jump ship again for good knowing full well that the right minds are behind the future of Maxon. Even more importantly, our futures as artists. On that note, gotta fly! Time for combat training!