Adobe After Effects 7.0
Platform: Mac OS X 10.3/4, Windows XP
Price: £565 plus VAT (Standard) ; £915 plus VAT (Professional) ; £169 plus VAT (upgrade) ; £915 plus VAT (Production Studio Standard)
Company: Adobe
Pros: Redesigned interface speeds up workflow. Graph editor offers more control over effects. 32-bit boosts output quality. OpenGL 2.0 implementation makes 3D compositing faster. New timewarp effect.
Cons: OpenGL system occasionally crashes and doesn’t work under 32-bit mode. Animation Presets weakly implemented.
Adobe hasn’t taken its foot off the pedal for AE’s seventh major release. High-end users working on digital intermediate (DI) and digital film projects will love the expanded colour space, with support for HDR 32-bit media. There’s a hugely expanded set of presets that are bound to appeal to creatives who work to tight deadlines in the corporate video market. And every user will appreciate the much-improved interface.
After Effects has always suffered from an interface that can easily get very messy, with up to 20 palettes overlapping and blocking each other (with the long, thin Effects and Effect Control palettes always being the worst offenders).
The new interface (above right) takes inspiration from compositing heavyweights Shake and Eyeon Fusion – though Apple’s Motion also comes to mind. Palettes now always snap to each other, so they can’t slip out of sight or block others, and they can be collected into grouped sets. Combined with the darker interface shade enabled in AE 6.5, this makes AE look like a much more grown-up compositor – and it acts like one too.
This responsive layout is replicated across the rest of the new Production Studio: Premiere Pro 2.0 and Encore DVD 2.0.
It’s not just an organizational user interface (UI) upgrade though. AE 7.0 has gained a graph editor (below) – something that Shake and Digital Fusion have long held over After Effects. This enables you to modify effect and transform parameters over time using bézier curves, giving you more control over how values change between keyframes, compared to traditional linear or ease in/out types.
For practical reasons, you’re only going to want to work on a few parameters at once, but as the graph editor is an integral part of AE’s timeline, any keyframable parameter from any effect can be adjusted using the graph editor – including third-party effects.
The editor may be a high-end feature, but its simplicity and power will have users at every level using it regularly.
Another new high-end feature is support for 32-bit colour, which is also known as floating point colour or HDR (High Dynamic Range). This is of most use to those working in digital intermediate (DI) or digital film projects, but it improves the realism of blurs (including motion blur) and lighting effects in all 32-bit projects. It also allows you to import 32-bit RAW images from digital SLR cameras using Adobe's Camera Raw engine directly within After Effects.
Unfortunately, not all of AE’s effects work in 32-bit space. Most of the blurs and colour correction tools do, as do the bundled Keylight and Color Finesse plug-ins – but Ramp is the only generator that’s 32-bit. You also lose the OpenGL preview mode when working in 32-bit space. Most motion graphics artists will therefore want to work in 16-bit (or even 8-bit) mode, only switching the project over to 32-bit before rendering.
Playback of 3D workspaces and effects has been improved through support for OpenGL 2.0 – though this relies on your graphics card supporting the newer version of the 3D standard. We compared performance of a 3D scene built from rotating, keyed HD image sequences (stored on a Huge Systems MediaVault U320R SCSI drive – reviewed on page 110) in After Effects 6.5 and 7.0, running on a HP xw9300 workstation (reviewed on page 93).
We saw on obvious improvement in real-time 3D performance and preview times in version 7.0. The same is true for the claimed boost in mask rendering time.
However, the OpenGL preview system did crash a few times under the load (below), requiring a restart of AE.
This update is light on new effects. There are only three new additions: two blurs (Lens and Smart) and Timewarp. Lens Blur, as the name suggests, mimics the blur effects of real-world lenses. There’s a wide level of control, but no presets.
Smart Blur is designed to smudge uniform areas while leaving edges crisp. In practice, its results are more artistic than realistic, but when combined subtly with another blur, it’s great for cleaning up overly-compressed footage.
Timewarp is based on the F_Kronos retiming plug-in from The Foundry’s Furnace set. After Effects already features the company’s Keylight keying plug-in, and this is just as good. The Timewarp plug-in produces cleaner slow motion than AE’s out-of-the-box tools were capable of before, with smooth control offered by the graph editor.
Timewarp isn’t just a plug-in though. You can use the underlying technology directly on clips on the timeline by selecting Pixel Motion instead of the Frame Blending, which is useful if you want a clip to be extended to fit a fixed time rather than based on its content.
Instead of adding new effects, the upgrade focuses on expanding the number of Animation Presets (above), combinations of effects, animations, and masks with predefined output. Animation Presets were added in version 6.5, but this upgrade adds hundreds more.
The presets can be viewed through the newly-bundled Bridge browser, though we would have preferred to see previews within After Effects.
There’s a lack of cohesion to the Animation Presets system, especially when compared to Combustion’s Capsules. When applied, the underlying effects are just added to the Effect Control palette with all of their parameters listed, lacking the focused controls found within Capsules. You have to delete each effect manually if you change your mind, too.
More impressive is Auto Trace, which is similar to the tool added in Illustrator CS 2. This automatically traces outlines to create masks, working essentially as a vector-based version of a keying tool. There are keying-style tolerance controls and a choice of channels to work from.
There is also a whole host of minor additions, including HDV support, Flash video export and a new Script Editor.
After Effects 7.0 is a worthwhile upgrade for the UI improvements alone. There are a few niggles – the weak implementation of the Animation Presets system, occasional OpenGL-induced crash, and some strange page number errors in the manual – but After Effects is still the best overall compositing, motion graphics, and animation suite.
Article by Neil Bennett, DIGIT magazine © IDG 2006