Macenstein

Well, unfortunately it doesn’t fix Apple’s QuickTime 7.4 debacle, but Adobe has finally released After Effects 8.0.2. The update’s big feature is the newly added support for content from Panasonic P2 equipment, without transcoding or rewrapping. Adobe After Effects supports the Panasonic Op-Atom variant of MXF, which is the format used by Panasonic DV, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, and DVCPRO HD video cameras to record to P2 media. We recently picked up an HPX-2000 and an AVC compression card so we’ll be excited to check this out. I know very few of you care about After Effects, so keep reading only if you care about the other improvements 8.0.2 brings.

Notable fixes

• On Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard), Dynamic Link didn’t work correctly in Premiere Pro when switching between UI and non-UI versions of After Effects. Fixed. (5482671/W1610284)
• On Mac OS, clicking a folder alias in an import or replace file dialog box in All Acceptable Files or All Footage Files mode displayed a “Can’t import file” error. Fixed. (45378)
• On Mac OS, OpenGL and hardware acceleration used all VRAM on the GPU until the driver failed, causing display corruption of the OS and After Effects, or possible crash. Fixed. (44855)
• On Mac OS X v10.5 on PowerPC with OpenGL enabled, received an error “composition too complex…” on NVIDIA GeForce 6800 graphics card. Fixed. (45295)
• On Mac OS with OpenGL enabled and project in 32bpc mode, colors were dropped. Fixed. (45475)
• PSD layers didn’t import properly from PSD files with layer groups. Fixed. (45320)
• Crash when saving a project with a custom output simulation when output profile is the project’s working color space. Fixed. (45404)
• On Mac OS with OpenGL enabled, better memory management on low memory cards. (45492)
• Fixed support for AJA’s QuickTime codec suite. (45351)
• On Mac OS X v10.5: After Effects dock icon was not updated while RAM previewing: the progress bar appeared on the AE icon after RAM preview starts and it stayed on. Fixed. (45791)
• When Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously was enabled, there was a significant pause >12 sec, on an 8 core, 16gb Mac between when RAM preview finished building and when it started playback. Fixed. (45181)
• When you import a PSD file with vector masks inside layer groups using the import Composition – Cropped Layers/Layer size option; the PS vector masks are no longer offset from their original location. (45319)
• If you import a PSD file with Photoshop shape layers into After Effects 7, save the project, and then open that project in After Effects CS3, the masks created from the Photoshop vector masks are no longer scaled up to fill the composition. (45341)
• Linear light footage setting is now preserved cross-platform. (45653)
• When animating type to drift slowly, the tops of the type (when moving vertically) and side (when moving horizontally) of the letters were clipped on every other frame. Fixed. (45898)
• Low-end laptops that don’t meet minimum OpenGL requirements crash on quit in some cases. Fixed. (45937)
• Adaptive motion blur for layers in collapsed compositions was based on the local speed in the composition, rather than the effective speed—so static layers only got two samples of blur even if the precomposition layer was moving fast in the containing composition. Fixed. (45967)
• Preserve Underlying Transparency is no longer ignored when layer styles are applied. (45974)
• Layers that are inside of a PSD layer set no longer have the layer set’s opacity applied twice. (45975)
• Photoshop clipping group was applied twice on import. Fixed. (45976)
• Layers inside a PSD layer set with a mode other than “pass through” were cropped to document bounds rather than reflecting layer data. Fixed. (45977)
• Footage conformed to a higher frame rate left footage frozen on a frame before the end is reached. Fixed. (45986)
• After Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously was enabled, After Effects CS3 would show high CPU activity even when idle. Fixed. (45993)
• QuickTime gamma handling scheme broke WYSIWYG color management workflow common to video users. Fixed. (46027)
• QuickTime footage that imports with SDTV/HDTV profile will be assigned an sRGB profile on Power PC, or with the “Match Legacy After Effects QuickTime Gamma Adjustments” option checked on any platform. (46032)
• After Effects CS3 v8.0.2 fixes Mac OpenGL support for supported video cards under OS X v10.4.10 and v10.5. See also http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects/opengl.html.
• Multi-machine rendering rendering of Photoshop files failed with error “The Photoshop Library operation failed because the file name was not valid”. Fixed. (46119)
• Error occurred when using Increment And Save if the project was saved at the root volume of a boot drive. Fixed. (46120 )
• The current frame didn’t finish rendering if you switched away from application. Fixed. To enable this fix, please modify the preferences file and restart the application: [‘General Section’] ‘Allow Idle Application Rendering in 8.0.2’ = 01. (46128)
• Wav files listed as 24-bit 48 KHz played back as noise or highly distorted. Fixed. (46149)
• Camera raw files now display correctly after being adjusted in the Camera Raw dialog box on import if color management is off. (46194)
• Important bug fixes for encoding and decoding H.264-compressed content.
• On Mac OS, support has been fixed for Apple’s Uncompressed 10-bit (v210) codec when FCP Studio 2 is installed. (45324)
• Incorrect layout and functionality of localized PSD choose-layer dialog/radio buttons has been fixed. (45273)
• A mask path or shape path can now be correctly extended from its first point using the Pen tool. (45365)
• Decoding of PAL v210, UYVY, and 2vuy formats has been corrected. (46201)
• With Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously enabled, QuickTime footage was sometimes not included in rendering by background processes if any QuickTime footage was missing when the project was opened. Fixed. (45302)

A full list of bug fixes and known issues with the update can be found here.