After Effect’s new Shapes feature goes beyond cool Ninja stars - you can convert text to outlines and then add Shape filters such as Pucker & Bloat.

In many ways, After Effects is the most potent media tool in the entire Adobe product line, and with its combination of subtle interface enhancements and significant new tools for animation and visual experimentation, this latest version doesn’t disappoint. To top it all off, there’s a nice performance boost on Intel Macs, especially those with more than two cores.

After Effects is designed for motion graphics and advanced visual effects work, and this update delivers a nicely rounded array of completely new capabilities that will delight longtime users and make complex work easier for newcomers. After Effects CS3 is one of those rare applications that truly makes full use of a Mac Pro’s power, but be sure you’ve got more than the 1GB or 2GB of RAM recommended by Adobe to take full advantage of the improved speeds, especially if you’re working with high-definition video files. Also worth mentioning is the fact that After Effects CS3 requires the use of an optional third-party plug-in (GridIron Software’s Nucleo) to accomplish rendering as a background task, something we wish Adobe would build into After Effects. In previous versions, including audio in an animation preview invoked a delay before playback. This has been eliminated in After Effects CS3, and it’s a truly noticeable improvement for anyone working on music videos or other audio-critical content.

After Effect’s Shape layers are a cool new creative feature. Shape layers are vector-based graphics that offer a plethora of delightful visual goodies with minimal effort. You start by defining a basic primitive shape - rectangle, oval, star (a multipoint polygon), or freehand path (à la Illustrator) - with extensive controls, including gradient fills and strokes. Once a shape is created, you can hit it with some Illustrator-derived visual effects, including Pucker & Bloat, Twist, Zigzag, and some other tools to distort and mangle the shapes. Repeater is especially fun, and makes it a breeze to fill the screen with wild custom trails and visual echo effects that would have been torturously difficult to achieve in earlier versions. Every single aspect of a Shape layer can be easily animated over time, which delivers some truly hip and happy elements that will find immediate use in commercials, music videos, and any other creative animation endeavors. Text can be converted to outlines and processed with all the same cool stuff as shapes. And 3D transformations can now be applied to text at the character level, meaning that the kinds of flying logos that previously took hours to construct are now child’s play.

Once you realize the creative possibilities that present themselves with Shapes, you might decide to click the new brain icon in the timeline, which summons the Brainstorm window. Reminiscent of a feature seen in some arcane graphics apps, Brainstorm lets you select any combination of a layer’s parameters (either single layers or multiple layers) and automatically create mutations, with control over the amount of variation and randomness. You can choose one of the nine variations as the basis for a new Brainstorm, and even preview randomized animation parameters as they play right in the Brainstorm window. It’s fair to say that this wildly cool feature is going to appeal a lot to certain folks but appear gratuitous to others. Anyone who likes to explore the unexpected will delight in the vast creative possibilities.

More...