What's new in After Effects 8?After Effects 8 There is only one version of After Effects now - Professional, which means motion tracking, keyframable slow motion etc are always there. After Effects also has some significant new features: Puppet tool This is an amazing tool. Take a picture of a person - either a photo or a graphic, and add points at the joints. Then you can pick up part of the figure - the hand for example - and start moving the mouse around and you suddenly have an animated character! This tool is easy to use and you can quickly create interesting and downright silly animations. It can be used for just taking a picture of a real person and making his figure realistically touch a button that he did not actually touch or making a character jump around the screen. Expect the internet to be suddenly flooded with animations of George Bush and Gordon Brown dancing together! Brainstorm In After Effects you can keyframe everything. Sometimes, though, you can play for ages trying to get a look you like without actually having a real result in mind. Well now you can get After Effects to play for you. Just choose the parameters you want to change and choose Brainstorm and After Effects presents you with several possible variations. Click on the ones you like the look of, saying "I want a bit of that mixed with a bit of that etc.." and click Brainstorm again. Carry on until you get something you like. Vector painting Photoshop paints in pixels. This means that as you zoom into an image you see bigger and bigger dots until the image is lost. Illustrator draws vectors - images that you can zoom into and they stay crisp. ALthough you could paint before in After Effects, with this version the Illustrator engine is now used and you can draw all sorts of shapes. There are also some really cool animation helpers that can take these shapes and then make abstract animations from them (and apply a Brainstorm to get the computer to make some choices for you). This is great for generating interesting animated backgrounds for titles, DVD menus etc.. Better Photoshop integration Photoshop now does video but that's not the only thing that has changed. In Photoshop you can take a layer and add lots of "blending options", such as glow, bevel, texture, stroke etc.. The only problem was once you had a look you like you would essentially freeze it and then bring it into After Effects. Now if you open a Photoshop file if you want you can choose to bring it in with the blending modes now editable in After Effects. This means that they are now also something you can animate! Excellent for titles. Vanishing Point A really cool tool. Vanishing Point was added to Photoshop for still images. Say you wanted to take a logo and put it on a building so that it matched the perspective of a wall and looked like it was real - then Vanishing Point let you draw meshes over the still image which defined the shape of the building in reality. Now with After Effects CS3 you can bring these Vanishing Point files into After Effects and then start to fly around the building! As we have not yet reached the technology of Blade Runner (assuming you saw the Ridley Scott movie) when you fly to something that cannot be seen in the photograph you end up with a black space. However this tool wiAs there is now only one version of After Effects, not a Standard and Professional, at least you know all the features you have read about will be in the final you buy.
ll be great for taking, for example, a hi-res still of a building and adding a subtle movement to it for a more interesting establishing shot. | 
