Ever After with Adobe After Effects 4.1
Written: Sep 06 '00 (Updated Feb 26 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Powerful, full featured, mature product that's affordable.
Cons: User must supply the creativity.
The Bottom Line: Powerful compositing at a competitive price, Adobe After Effects is a "must have" program for motion graphic production.
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| dlamarrx's Full Review: Adobe After Effects Standard 4.0 Full Version Acad... |
For the money, After Effects (AE) is the best multi-purpose animation tool available on the market – bar none. It is specifically aimed at those who make a living designing motion graphics for film, video, multimedia and the web. I could create a long laundry list of superlatives about AE, but rather, let’s look at what it does for me, how I use it on a daily basis, and how it has become my most important and indispensable tool.
I spend my days creating graphics & editing video for television commercials. I use many tools – Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects, Lightwave 3D, Quicktime Pro, Terran Media Cleaner Pro, DPS Velocity, AVID Media Composer, and Equilibrium Debabelizer. Far and away the two most important and useful programs in my arsenal are After Effects and Photoshop.
AE allows me to create stunning commercials in just a few hours with only my own imagination and skill limiting me. I can create a layer file of text graphics in Photoshop and then import that file, maintaining layers and effects, into AE. AE allows me to manipulate those layers in infinite ways. Slide them, blur them, highlight them, spin them, bounce them, the possibilities are endless. Photographs, video and film are also equally easy to work with.
For me, a typical project entails - video, text graphics, and still images – all composited together into one thirty second finished commercial. For a recent project, I was required to take some actors, previously videotaped standing in front of a blue background (bluescreen), and composite them into an animated scene – a la “Blues Clues.” The animated scene was a jungle setting with lions and tigers and snakes (oh my!). The client supplied me with the characters in Illustrator format. I created the background and character animations in Photoshop, imported them - layers intact - into AE, then added drop shadows and cycled movement to both the characters and the background. Next, I imported the video of the actors, used the “Color Key” function in AE to make the blue transparent, and finally, placed them in this jungle fantasyland. The last step was to composite the entire scene onto the computer generated jiggling uvula (that jiggly thing in the back of your throat) of the boy actor, creating a digital zoom into his mouth and down his throat – showing the jungle scene on his uvula. One weeks work and a very happy client later, I was moving on to my next project. Without After Effects, I could not have completed this project with such speed, high quality and for such a reasonable price. As little as five years ago, this project would have taken heavy-duty, expensive workstations costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Today, for under ten grand, I can do it, and I can do it FAST!
Many of the features in AE seem customized for me – particularly those introduced with version 4.1. Some of the new features I find most useful include:
Network Rendering
……Network rendering, used in conjunction with Collect Files and Watch Folders, allows me to purchase only one license for one computer, but render projects on multiple machines. No more waiting for my primary computer to finish rendering before I can use it for the next project. No more rendering over night, only to come in the next morning to find that I made a mistake and have to re-render all over again. This boosts my productivity immensely and makes the best use of all my available resources. Rendering time is no longer an issue.
High-Resolution Images
……Previously limited to 4000 x 4000 pixels, AE can now import images of up to 32,000 x 32,000 pixels. This allows greater than film resolution images to be imported and used – with the power and memory of the computer your only real limitation.
Flowchart Views
……My projects often have dozens if not hundreds of source files, layers and compositions – each working together to create the finished product. The new Flowchart Views allow me to easily and painlessly view my projects from the “big picture” perspective. No longer do I have to track through different and myriad folders trying to hunt down that one file and the effect I applied to it. Click, click, click and there’s the file displaying all the effects applied, and in what order. What I would like to see, is the ability to drag and drop effect sets from one file to another. Double clicking takes you to the file, but that’s about all you can do for now.
As has been mentioned in other Epinions, AE works best when used in conjunction with Adobe’s other suite of tools – Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premier. However, this in no way limits AE’s use. I look on each of these companion programs as merely supercharged plug-ins - important and highly useful yes, but AE has legs of it’s own and can stand on those proud and tall. Only Photoshop (or a comparable still image editing and creation package) is critical in the day to day use of AE, because Photoshop is where you can prepare and create all the graphics files you import into AE.
Some Epinionators have mentioned a steep learning curve for After Effects, but I don’t find that to be the case. I think the learning curve is highly dependent upon each individual’s background. I have been both a computer programmer and a video editor. I found AE to be quite intuitive in its basic functions. There is a learning curve, and in my opinion it’s a multi-tiered one. The basic functions are pretty easy to learn, and once you start using the keyboard shortcuts, those basic functions become even easier.
After learning the basic functions, the curve does get steeper. However, the tone of this learning curve is far more based upon the users own creativity than it is upon any restriction or difficulty within AE itself. The tools are there, and not difficult to use, but it’s up to the user to find out how best to use them to create the finished product.
What is difficult about the process, is being effectively creative with AE. Creativity is determined not by the tool, but by the tool user. Just like the firearm that can be used for both good and evil, AE can be used to create a masterpiece. It can also be used to create cr@p. Anybody can use AE to slap a few shots back to back – but to create something effective, fascinating, interesting and masterful takes time and experience. This however, is true no matter the program used. And yet, I’m going to contradict myself. I have found that AE almost begs me to be creative. I push that button and flip that lever and throw that switch - just to see what happens. Sometimes it’s magic, at other times…
AE has become the most popular compositing program on the market. It can be used in extremely diverse situations – from simple web animation to broadcast television and into standard and IMAX film projects. Its virtually transparent integration with Adobe’s other packages, ease of use, network and workflow capabilities and affordability make it absolutely irresistible.
AE is the most important, creative and useful tool in my arsenal. No program has so revolutionized the motion graphics industry like After Effects has. Adobe After Effects is Photoshop in motion, in speed and on fire!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
dlamarrx
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Location: Seattle, WA
Reviews written: 32
Trusted by: 65 members
About Me:
Video Production Manager for an Advertising firm, my favorite time is spent with my family.
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