Ultra 2 in After Effects CS3?
 

Does anyone know is Ultra 2 is going to come bundled with Adobe CS3 Production Studio or if it will be integrated into the new After Effects at some point? I'd really like to have it but won't be able to get my company to spring for it unless it's bundled or part of AE.

I seriously doubt that Adobe would add this as a plug-in. From a revenue standpoint, I don't think such an addition will, in itself, sell more copies of AE. So how would Adobe get an ROI from their purchase of Serious Magic.

But since you brought it up, I'm begining to wonder if Adobe will rethink their pricing of Ultra. Leaving pricing the way it is now means the product will be priced very close to a full edition of After Effects. While I know that Ultra is not a complete compositing program like AE, and it would not steal marketshare away, I'm left wondering if pricing them so close together "cheapens" AE (at least in the minds of the consumer.)

On that note, I recently saw several academic software sites selling academic versions of Ultra 2.0 for $159. They all stated a savings of $40 off of retail. That suggests that the retail price for the full (not upgrade) version of Ultra 2.0 is $199.

To confuse the issue even more, the above pricing is listed under "Adobe". If you check for Ultra 2.0 under "Serious Magic" the retail price is listed at $499.

Maybe a price decrease is in the works now?

Id buy Ultra 2 if it were only $200.

The pricing is all over the place for this product - anyone buying this now for the full list could reasonably feel aggrieved. It's possible that the price drop is also related to a new version (i.e. v3.0) coming out, but on the Serious Magic web site it says:
Buy Production Studio, Premiere Pro 2.0, Flash Professional or After Effects and get Ultra 2 for only $199.. Also, did they always include master set #1 with Ultra?

The software works very well, but although the virtual sets are a great idea, they generally look garish, particularly the brighter lit ones. They are also too expensive, but there again, what Serious Magic is trying to shift on their web site for $399, Videoguys is selling for $199, i.e. variable pricing again.

When I talked with the famous bald guy (can't think of his name though) from Serious Magic at NAB 2006, he told me Ultra 2 was the end of the line for the inexpensive product. Future versions would be quite a bit more expensive with motion tracking capabilities from specialized hardware. This would allow you to have a motion tracking dolly that would duplicate camera movements into the background virtual set and let you really pan around a person and also have it correspondingly pan around the virtual set in real time. They were demonstrating something like this (as were several companies) but said it was going to be very expensive--in the $40,000 range with all the hardware and software. So, unless something's changed there may be no new development for Ultra as we know it.

Vector?
 

So does anyone know how "vector keying" works exactly? It's still a chroma key obviously, so is it just an addition of a set of algorithms to interpret shadows, translucence, etc.?

Well I don't know about the rest of you guys but I could really care less about the virtual sets. That just seems gimicky to me and I shouldn't have to pay for it just to get the vector keying. Maybe Adobe will be smart and sell the vector keying as part of AFX and do the whole motion tracking virtual sets things as a stand alone product.

CS3 was just announced officially does anyone have any further info on any of this?

Well, it's official.

Ultra and HD/DV Rack are part of the Adobe CS3 Production Premium.

That's excellent news.
I'm surprised DVrack got integrated into Premiere.
I would have thought it would have been the other way around, DVrack remaining it's own program and Ultra2 being integrated into AE.

But no matter. Great news.

Ultra 2 @ $160
 

Here is a link to a fair price for Ultra 2. I may be an academic version?
http://www.academicsuperstore.com/ca...duct_id=779451
Cheers,
Christo

I think the name of the site answers your question ;)