Adobe After Effects

Why After Effects?

A common question for those used to Premiere is why use After Effects? After all you can layer up to 99 video tracks in Premiere, do chromakey, lumakey etc.. Why learn a new program? 

After Effects is intended to be used for special sequences - a title sequence or DVD intro for example.  It is not an editing program - that is Premiere’s job.  You can use Premiere  to select the portions of clips that you want to mix in After Effects. Just make a rough cut in Premiere, then open the project in After Effects.

Quality

After Effects makes better quality effects than Premiere. The rendering of effects is simply better - titles roll smoothly up the screen no matter what the speed - the chromakey is better, does better edges, the slow motion is superior, and you have options for frame blending and motion blur.

Control

You have much more control over your effects than with Premiere: you can set motion paths to accelerate and decelerate through each keyframe giving you much more realistic movement.  With Premiere this kind of superior quality effect is only achievable using plug-ins like Boris or the Matrox RT effects.

Keyframing is easy and it is very simple to copy keyframes between clips.  And everything can be keyframed. 

For text you can keyframe the point size so that no matter how large the words are on screen the edge is always smooth.  You can keyframe movement, rotation and transparency all very easily. With the Production pack you can even keyframe the speed of the clip making it speed up and slow down.

Simplicity

At first After Effects may look complicated.  In fact, after you learn some of the basics it gets easy.  You apply effects to clips and control them all in the same way. 

“Real Time” Previews

The main preview window shows you all the changes you make as you make them.  After Effects has a sophisticated RAM PREVIEW function.  Essentially it makes up your composition in RAM, rather than to disk and plays it straight away on screen.  If it can’t cope with the complexity of the effects it drops the quality so that it will always at the right speed.  Not real time in the DV Storm or RT.X100 sense of the word but it does mean you can see ALL of the effects on offer without performing a proper render.
Normally in After Effects you do not have any output to TV - everything is on your PC screen.  Some cards, like the Matrox and Canopus range, have a WYSISYG plug in - this effectively allows you to see the contents of the preview screen on the TV attached to the card. 

Lots Of Effects

There are loads of filters and effects available and you may find that you never use some of them, or you may find so many options daunting.  It is well worth investing not just in the software but a good training guide - like the Total Training Videos, aDVC After Effects Introduction Course or even simply a good manual - there is a very easy to follow book available, “Creative After Effects” by Angie Taylor, that is a very good place to start.

After Effects - now at version 6.5 - is available in two flavours: Standard and Production Pack. The Production Pack is full of more specialised effects like motion tracking, time remapping and more sophisticated 3D.

What are some of the cool features of After Effects?

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.