Just returned from a one-day AE class held by Chris and Trish Meyers. They used a late Beta Copy of AE 6 for the class.

Very nice, that version. The title capability and the motion tracking with cloning is more than enough to make me want it.

August cannot get here soon enough.

Yeah, but there is no upgrade path. If you are currently using AE PB then you'll have to lay out another $1500. That's pretty nasty. No wonder people pirate software.

<<<-- Originally posted by Adrian Douglas : Yeah, but there is no upgrade path. If you are currently using AE PB then you'll have to lay out another $1500. -->>>

Que?

The upgrade from PB to Pro is $300:
http://www.adobe.com/store/products/competitive_upgrade.jhtml?id=AEupgrades

Imaging a locked down shot of LAX. Commuter plane coming in to land. Jet taking off in background and fairly small.

They motion track the jet with a much easier setup than 5.5, then set up the Clone tool (new) to track with the motion tracker and then, instead of asking the Clone tool to copy from someplace else in the sky, it can be set to copy from some TIME before or after the tracker passes it's current point but from that point. So the sky, which had a varying amount of blue (or white depending on your viewpoint) was copied perfectly.

The result is that the sky that is in back of the plane is used to paint out the plane. Perfectly from what I could see.

So not only did the motion tracker work correctly (and with a great deal of precision and speed compared to 5.5), but one could actually do something besides stabilize an image.

I think I could remove a car passing in front of a building with this set of tools.

Roll me in honey and feed me to ants, either they added it since I read the page last or I just didn't read it properly. Thanks Nigel, you just saved me $1200

There's a cunningly well-hidden link from the main purchase page, which is fairly easy to overlook. Them marketing boyz'n'gurlz are tricksy and no mistake!

Painting out such items is terribly difficult if you have a static
camera, just requires a bit of work (http://www.405themovie.com/makingof04.asp)

Yea, I wonder if I'll be using that program when i go to LTI.. Who knows. They mentioned that they will be using adobe premiere and photoshop but who knows. Anyway, I'm out to film for the day, later board.