Today as I was scrolling through Twitter (X) I came across a very interesting post. Someone has turned a bunch of programs from the Adobe suite into an open-source download.
I found another post that mentioned how you can use ai to natively create Adobe Premiere or After Effects files. I can’t recall the last time I scrolled so casually through some game-changing film and animation news such as this. What makes it more interesting is that, these programs being open source, they are free to download and even make adjustments to the code yourself in addition to the other obvious benefits of being free and essentially the same program you would pay money to subscribe to.
Even though I’ve heard this news a few hours before writing this blog, I haven’t tried any of the programs out yet. A friend of mine has mentioned trying it, and that they worked pretty well but are under-featured at the moment. This tells me there is a ton of promise in this method for creators having access to industry-standard programs for nothing. In other words, there is a future that exists where there is no cost to access the programs to unleash your creativity.
As someone who uses Toonboom (and pays for it), I am…ecstatic about the prospect of this. We are at a point where regular people can create apps that multi-million dollar studios would have killed for a decade ago, and at no cost. While I always have supported these companies to the best of my abilities, in recent years the price gouging has become egregious and I do think it’s time for some serious competition to knock some sense back into these developers.
You can make your customers mad for only so long before they start to turn on you. I hope this is a wake-up call to companies that have been unfair to their audience. There is a large market correction that is underway as companies try to squeeze every penny out of their base without providing a quality of product or service. I will definitely be keeping a close eye on these projects and seeing how they evolve over time (I will also be downloading them to test).
Perhaps my dream of abandoning Adobe and finding a “forever” animation program is more tangible than I realized.
Links:
https://x.com/math_fournity/status/2107554211529724384?s=12
https://x.com/trymirage/status/2107504042205139269?s=12
-Until next time-