After Effects is Photoshop for moving images. It specialises in animations and complex video effects, often combining lots of discrete objects. Features such as randomisers and particle generators separate it from general-purpose video-editing software. Adobe has dispensed with the Standard version for this release, which means that £1,033 is now the starting price for After Effects. However, there's little point in buying it by itself, as Creative Suite 3 Production Premium (£1,656 including VAT) bundles it with Photoshop Extended, Premiere Pro, Illustrator and Flash Pro.
The Puppet tool is a brand new feature for animating bitmaps. It's ostensibly designed for character animation, and works by creating pins at the joints in a character and using keyframes to animate their position. It's delightfully easy to use, and movement ripples through characters in a fairly convincing manner. However, it knows nothing about anatomy, so when moving an elbow, the wrist stays locked in position. The Puppet Starch Tool can add some rigidity to specific parts of an image, but only with limited success. Ultimately, it's no substitute for dedicated character animation software, such as E Frontier Poser, which uses 3D models of people that move in anatomically correct ways (and costs around £120). However, the Puppet tool has a certain cartoon-like charm of its own, and can also be applied to other, non-human bitmaps. When combined with After Effects' Expression commands we were able to add internal motion to bitmaps, keeping tight control over how each part moved.
The other major new creative tool is vector drawing. It's based on the same Pen tool and Bézier curves used for creating masks in previous versions, but when they're used to create a Shape Layer, an outline and fill, including gradient fills with variable opacity, is available. It won't put Illustrator out of business, but the ability to animate any parameter is extremely welcome, particularly for credits sequences and DVD menu design.
You can now animate 3D text by individual word or character. There are lots of presets to show off the new capabilities, which add greatly to After Effects' impressive aptitude for dramatic titles. However, from here on in, the new features are a little underwhelming. Brainstorm is the overly grand name for a tool that previews settings at different values side by side. Integration with Flash is heralded as a major new feature, but we found it to be of limited use, either ignoring non-compatible features (which is most if them) or rendering each frame as a rasterised JPEG.
Our biggest disappointment was that we experienced quite a few crashes. We could usually save our work before quitting, but not always. We hope that updates will improve matters. Still, it's hard to feel down about After Effects because, despite its foibles, it's flexible, precise, great fun to use and produces spectacular results. For video producers considering the CS3 Production Premium bundle, it's enough to sway the decision.
System Specifications
Requires Windows XP/Vista, 512MB RAM, 1GB disk space
Author: Ben Pitt
Computer Shopper Online