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Adobe Backpedals on Commitment to Bring Metal to After Effects

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At WWDC 2015, Adobe director of engineering David McGavran demonstrated After Effects and Illustrator on Mac integrated with Metal, Apple's new high-performance graphical acceleration API on OS X El Capitan. At the end of the demo, he said that Adobe is committed to bringing Metal to multiple Creative Cloud apps on Mac.
"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."
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Adobe has since changed its tune about its commitment to Metal on Mac, however, as Adobe product manager Todd Kopriva this week said in the Adobe Communities that the company has not made a commitment to Metal or any other GPU acceleration technology at this time.
"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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Kopriva admitted that Adobe "sent a confusing message" about its commitment to Metal.
"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," said Kopriva. "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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Adobe's demo included Illustrator's rending engine built on Metal, which allowed for continuous zoom, while After Effects had up to an 8x performance improvement in rendering and reduced CPU usage with Metal.

Metal is available for both iOS and OS X developers, with documentation, sample code and video tutorials available on Apple's website.

Update: Adobe provided the following statement to MacRumors:
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 with Apple's Metal technology, 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."
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(Thanks, Chris!)

Article Link: Adobe Backpedals on Commitment to Bring Metal to After Effects
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2015/10/05/adobe-backpedals-metal-after-effects/
Announce a huge commitment on stage to millions of viewers? Nope. Doesn't count. We'll have our product lead and chief decision maker not go on stage, but instead write about it on some obscure forum months after we have changed our mind. That's how you do PR!

We the viewers have no idea who that person is on stage, but like it or not they are representing Adobe to a massive audience. Way to shoot yourselves in the foot when it comes to future Apple Keynote events.
 
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So the weird thing is, over the weekend I updated to El Capitan and I already experienced a huge speed boost when I opened up After Effects! I've never had real-time render previews before, but now it just renders in real-time no problem. I took an animation video project that took 15 minutes to render last week and it only took 5.5 minutes to render after I updated. So After Effects has already benefitted by the Metal API! Thank you Apple!
 
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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," said Kopriva. "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."
Click to expand...

Wow. Way to throw that guy under the bus.

Obligatory video:

 
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Like Google, Adobe is marketing their "experiments" as products prematurely. This is especially evident in their iOS apps which have the shortest life expectancy. Wish they would label such "experiments" as such so I don't alter my workflow unnecessarily.
 
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barubin88 said:
I would like to say that I started this post and showed it to Chris. https://forums.adobe.com/message/8026619#8026619

Todd is on a huge power trip.
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Yes. At the very least, it appears that Adobe is unable to control the message effectively. The engineer was very clear on stage. Our Todd seems to be the one sending out confusing messages. I'm sure he's "in charge" and a leadership genius and all that, but wow.
 
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Adobe is slowly eroding themselves with their dominant position behavior (pricing, product bloat, lack of actual product improvement, etc). Some day they will become sort of irrelevant. At the very least, their strangle hold on the graphics market will end as multiple competitors (on multiple fronts) catch up and make their peoducts more compelling (probably on the expense front, first and foremost).
 
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To be fair, this is a tricky subject. Sounds like some internal engineering BS is going on behind the scenes. "Metal is easy to implement! Cool. Let's show something at the Apple keynote. Crap, you said too much..."

This is probably a Windows / cross-platform hang-up if anything. Since Metal is only available on Mac OS X, anything they do is not going to work on Windows—and vice versa. As we all know, Windows is where their bread is buttered and has been for some time.

I'm guessing here but what they need to do is have a platform agnostic higher level API that works on both platforms that abstracts general drawing calls to that platform... eg Metal on OS X and DirectX on Windows. OpenGL was that baby for awhile, but not all graphics cards do it very well. And we all know how OpenGL support on the Mac is. Then Adobe starting tinkering with hitting the graphics cards directly for better performance. Now that we have Metal, we can only hope that's the route they're going down.

For what it's worth, DirectX 12 isn't supported either.
 
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Wtf? They've seen how much better it runs on Metal and they don't want to commit to turning the experiment into an actual product?

Just today I've had After Effects tell me multiple times "You need more than 2 frames for a RAM preview." ..... I had... the whole timeline... selected. I hate when it does this.

They need to get their whole game together. Dreamweaver has got to be the worst of the products I use. Which is why I use Coda at home.
 
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No surprise—they've been neglecting bug fixes in all their apps for years. And yet....

Adobe Remains Firmly Committed to Charging Your Account Every Month Forever

(And are we truly to believe Adobe ONLY JUST NOW watched the keynote from a month ago, and suddenly realized something was said that "wrong all along"? Or did they perhaps know that very day exactly what was said, and KNOWINGLY let it stand for a month before backpedaling?)

Why on Earth did Adobe think they were invited on stage? To show off some experiments that might be impractical in the real world? No. Apple wouldn't promote Adobe to the world while making their own Metal look bad in that way. They were on stage because they were committed to using Metal. Backpedal. Maybe they shouldn't have pretended they were ready to commit, but they just really wanted some of that Apple PR buzz?

Who thinks Adobe's going to be on stage next time? :D
 
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