After Effects 5.5

After Effects 5.5, which began shipping in January, advances the effort to add perspective and the illusion of three dimensions that was introduced in version 5.0. While AE 5.0 had many new features and enhancements, the addition of a virtual camera and dimensional space needed a few improvements for artists to smoothly transition to 2.5D design. This latest version fills in the blanks nicely.

Among the biggest improvements are multiple simultaneous views of the 3D space and high quality intersections. Multiple scene views are standard operating procedure for 3D artists and for good reason; trying to navigate around a black void using a single view can be disorienting. Default simultaneous side, top, front, and camera views are available, but these can also be customized with unlimited options for creating and saving personal preferences.

Intersections are now supported including appropriate transfer functions all beautifully anti-aliased. Layers placed at intersecting angles can pass through other layers allowing for complex imitation of true 3D sets and environments including proper rendering of depth of field. Because the SDK allows access to the renderer, we can expect third-party developers to begin producing lots of new 3D plug-ins.

As it turns out, the majority of the most popular effects have been updated for 16-bit rendering including many third-party effects. Adobe has been purchasing some of the more popular plug-in packages and last year many of Final Effects' filters were bundled with Version 5.0. Brian Maffitt, the developer responsible for After Effects Total Training series, sold his popular Atomic Power Evolution filters to Adobe, and these are now included in the base package.

Some of the new effects added in Version 5.5 are Adjust Levels (individual parameters for adjustable tracks), Color Stabilizer, 4-Color Gradient, Cell Pattern and Grid, Roughen Edges, Time Difference, and Advanced Lighting. Two of my favorites are Color Stabilizer and Advanced Lighting. The Color Stabilizer allows you to pick a reference or “pivot” frame, select a user-defined area, and automatically match all the other frames to that sample. This is useful to remove flicker of the kind found in silent films or any other unpredictable frame-to-frame variation in brightness. The stabilizer can make adjustments based on Brightness, Levels or Curves. The new Advanced Lighting effect means projection lights. In the manual, this is called the stained-glass effect, but I'm sure we'll see this type of light used to project motion sequences onto moving planes and objects in addition to photo real effects such as caustics and other lighting phenomenon.

With so many effects piling up in the Effects Menu, After Effects has finally added an Effects Palette. If you're like me, you can't resist owning every effect available, but the truth is that there is considerable redundancy in the plug-in community. There are probably something like 250 effects now available for After Effects — a lot to sort through. To make all this more efficient, the Effects Palette allows you to organize your filters into folders such as Blurs or Particle FX or browse for them by name using the search function. Now all the filters required for a specific project can be stored in a special folder and placed wherever you need it.

Import Options have also been added. These include both Maya IFF and RLA/RPF files in 8-bits per channel and 16-bits per channel versions. Macromedia Flash .swf files, 16-bits per channel SGI and MPEG-1 are also new. Because Maya is available for the Mac OS X and the Mac 9.1, this makes for a powerful combination for 3D-starved Mac folks. There is also support for Maya camera data imported as ASCII project files (.ma). This very powerful combination of 2 and 3D basically puts the Mac on an equal plane with the PC as a serious visual-effects creation platform. Actually, AE's support of the ASCII format means that with a little scripting work, users should be able to import LightWave, Max and Softimage cameras. The 3DS Max RPF format is also a powerful file format because it contains advanced camera information useful to compositors.

Another sought-after new feature is Smart Masks. Ever since points and splines have been able to animate over time in morph and vector paint programs, the problem of gnarly interpolation between keyframes has made “automated” animation nearly impossible. Smart Masks are a step in the right direction and allow the user considerable control over the type of interpolation and the frequency of computer-generated keyframes. While this won't allow you to make a walk cycle for a character with only a few mask shapes, it will definitely make rotoscoping and dynamic shapes for mattes behave in a predictable and labor-saving way.

After Effects has been around longer than most any other desktop compositing system, and it's in the hands of some very serious users at the top effects houses. They are matched on the Adobe side by a terrific team of highly attentive engineers. Every release means that there are lots of smaller interface and workflow enhancements. Here are a few of the new ones:

Cycle through tools from the keyboard.

Cycle through transfer modes: This is great since at some point, you want to try all those modes out in hopes of finding a cool new look.

Set Wireframe in Comp window: Do it once rather than for every layer.

Paste into multiple layers: Another way to avoid repetitive stress syndrome.

View only modified properties: A way to avoid clutter when working with lots of layers.

Duplicate Masks: Much faster cloning than copy and paste.

Add motion blur to masks: Inspired by Commotion's rotosplines and well-implemented.

There are also some improvements to expressions making them easier to use, such as operators that simplify expressions that include math functions. There is not enough space here to cover the minutiae of this powerful feature set, but expressions are definitely worth the effort to learn. By spending just a few hours, you will discover that even being able to use the growing library of scripts available online for common tasks will save you hours of drudgery.

After Effects is now OS X native, though my informal polling of graphic artists shows a reluctance to give up 9.1.1. Most of the early adopters I spoke with, however, are very impressed with the stability of the new operating system and have had good experiences using OS X for production.

And finally, Zaxwerks Invigorator is bundled with After Effects. This is the Invigorator Classic plug-in that lets you extrude 3D objects from Illustrator outlines such as fonts or logos. Invigorator sets up a parallel 3D space that is identical to the AE 2.5D space. You manipulate a 3D model in Invigorator, and it updates that model in real time on a flat layer in AE's Composition window. For an additional $195, you can get the Pro version that rather amazingly imports 3D meshes from Maya (OBJ), LightWave, 3D Studio Max, Electric Image, Cinema 4D and DXF. You can also control edge shapes, change the shape of models over time (a usable hack) and export models to other programs. Pro also speeds rendering with support for OpenGL.

As with Invigorator, new color-correction tools are available for AE but only as plug-ins. While a robust plug-in architecture opens the door to the considerable development talent and entrepreneurship in the world, some features belong in the program. Invigorator's capabilities and color correction should be part of the base package, or at the very least, the production bundle. AE is also in need of a new particle system that is a core part of the system and an improved tracker. With the recent release of Combustion 2 and its very powerful particle system and the Flame/Inferno tracker, AE users will feel as though they are using servicable versions of these tools, but not the latest and greatest.

With the addition of Maya camera import, multiple viewing windows and clean rendering intersections of 3D layers, After Effects has a very powerful dimensional solution. Because of its tight integration with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, AE remains the single best motion graphic product for individuals and boutique design studios. It is a solid choice for visual-effects houses and has a presence at practically every major studio on the West Coast. Producers will find that qualified After Effects artists outnumber any other comparable product's user base by a factor of perhaps 15 to one. At any price, After Effects is an excellent professional solution. In its price range, it remains the finest compositing and broadcast design product available.