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.

 

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Brainstorm allows you to try out variations on a theme, such as these nine versions of the After Effects CC Ball Action plug-in.

 

Another killer addition is the Puppet tool, which delivers a uniquely useful approach for anyone interested in creating convincing character animation from still images. It’s based on a combination of powerful image warping and reshaping abilities, combined with some wicked-smart depth prioritization and masking, allowing you to take a flat image and bring it to life in ways that would thrill Terry Gilliam or the South Park guys. Expect to see a new wave of homebrew YouTube cartoons once folks dig their teeth into the chewy Puppet goodness.

 

Tight integration with other Adobe apps has always been an advantage enjoyed by After Effects, and CS3 continues the tradition by delivering excellent communications with Photoshop Extended and Flash. For example, if you make extensive use of the Vanishing Point feature in Photoshop, you’ll really appreciate the fact that After Effects recognizes and utilizes the 3D information. Wrap a picture around a box in Photoshop, apply Vanishing Point to create a 3D deformation of the 2D image, and after you import that to After Effects, you can move the After Effects camera around the box to see the image properly mapped in pseudo-3D. This is seriously cool and critical for specific types of visual effects work. Flash animators will breathe a sigh of relief when they discover that imported Flash files now rasterize frame by frame, a longtime ability with Illustrator files that was previously denied to Flash content. This results in much crisper graphics when creating trucking and zooming effects. Combined with the ability to create Flash Cue Points out of selected After Effects keyframes, this marries the two applications together in a meaningful way. Stir in support for embedded ICC color profiles in After Effects documents, and you end up with a more streamlined and efficient workflow that will save time and money in a professional production environment.

 

The bottom line. After Effects has always been the go-to motion graphics tool of choice, even in the face of a number of potential competitors, but it’s fair to say that this version cements its status as King of the Moving Hill. We couldn’t live without this app, and if animation is part of your life, neither can you.

 

COMPANY: Adobe

CONTACT: www.adobe.com

PRICE: $999 à la carte, $299 upgrade, available in two CS3 bundles ($1,699 to $2,499)

REQUIREMENTS: G4 or later or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.4.9 or later, 1GB RAM (2GB for HD), 3GB disk space

Enhanced performance on multiprocessor and Intel Macs. Excellent new creative features. Tighter integration with the rest of the CS3 suite. Universal binary.

Background rendering still not built in.