By Dale Farris, Vice President
Golden Triangle PC Club
November 2004

Adobe After Effects 6.5 software continues to set new standards in motion graphics and visual effects for film, video, DVD, and the Web. Offering unmatched integration with Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Encore DVD, Adobe Audition, Photoshop CS, and Illustrator CS software, After Effects gives you the speed, precision, and power to be visually innovative as you meet production challenges and deliver quality results.

After Effects 6.5 is available in two editions:

After Effects 6.5 Standard provides core 2D and 3D compositing, animation, and visual effects tools.

After Effects 6.5 Professional includes all of the features in After Effects Standard plus motion tracking and stabilization, advanced keying and warping tools, more than 30 additional visual effects, a particle system, scripting, network rendering, 16-bit-per-channel color, additional audio effects, and more.

Top New Features

Advanced Clone Tool
Remove unwanted elements from multiple frames more accurately using the advanced Clone tool, which offers five presets and the ability to simultaneously view the source frame as an overlay while you paint.

Disk Caching
Take advantage of disk caching to speed up your interactive work.

Animation Presets
Save any combination of animation parameters — including transformations, masks, Expressions, effects, and text — as Animation Presets to quickly reuse without setting key frames.

Tighter Adobe Integration
Import Adobe Photoshop CS and Illustrator CS files with layers and other attributes preserved. In Windows, copy and paste selected Adobe Premiere Pro clips into After Effects, and create motion menus and buttons for use in Adobe Encore DVD and much more.

Color correction and Grain Management Effects
Adjust the color of footage and other elements with powerful color correction tools, such as Color Finesse. Use grain management tools to add grain to make video look more like film, or remove grain to give film the look of video (Professional edition only).

New Special Effects Plug-Ins
Add dramatic effects to your compositions with more than 60 new plug-ins, including Particle World, Light Burst, Light Sweep, and Toner.

New Text Animation Features
Set blend modes between characters, randomize text, write scripts to automate text changes within animations (Professional edition only), and more. Enjoy over 250 professionally designed text Animation Presets.

FireWire Video Output
Preview your compositions on NTSC and PAL video monitors whether you're using a Windows or a Mac OS X system.

More Flexible Motion Tracker
Zero in on any element with the enhanced Motion Tracker, which lets you use as many points as you like or standard one-, two-, and four-point settings; track change in scale or just horizontal or vertical movement; and edit the motion path (Professional edition only).

Enhanced Scripting
 Use scripts to automate management of the Render Queue as well as production tasks including changes to text and layers, creation of custom palettes, and more (Professional edition only).

After Effects Features

OpenGL Support
Be more productive with performance optimizations such as OpenGL support for extremely fluid interactive compositing.

Disk Caching
Take advantage of disk caching to speed up your interactive work.

Experience unmatched integration with Photoshop CS, Illustrator CS, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Encore DVD, and Adobe Audition software.

Easy to learn and use Learn as you work with Tool Tips, context-sensitive menus, and comprehensive online Help.

Parenting
Speed up production by defining a parent-child relationship between layers to ensure the child layer inherits all the transformations applied to the parent.

Be visually innovative

2D and 3D compositing environment
Composite and animate in 2D or 3D space using multiple cameras and lights.

Powerful animation and key framing
Animate layers by setting key frames at specific points in time for properties such as position, scale, rotation, and opacity. Or save time with Animation Presets.

Unrivaled text animation
Create animated text with unprecedented ease. Type and edit text in the Comp window, instantly apply more than 250 text Animation Presets, and much more.

Extensive visual effects
Create visual effects using more than 150 plug-ins to blur, sharpen, distort, shatter, and more.

Expressions
Create animations without using key frames by defining Expressions that link the behavior of one layer property to that of another property on any layer in the composition.

Integrated vector paint tools
Perform touch-up and rotoscoping with built-in vector paint tools, including the new advanced Clone tool, which makes it easier to handle even complex cleanup tasks.

Comprehensive masking tools
Easily design, edit, and work with masks using flexible auto-tracing options and RotoBézier masks.

Color correction tools Adjust the color of footage and other layer elements using color correction tools similar to those in Photoshop, as well as Color Finesse for high-end corrections.

Keying and matte tools
Control layer transparency using keying and matte tools.

Rendering and output
Produce professional output more efficiently using the Render Queue, the Advanced 3D Renderer, and more

Professional Use of After Effects

Adobe After Effects 6.5 is the most widely used motion graphics and effects compositing software, and the new integration between Audition 1.5, Premiere Pro 1.5, After Effects 6.5, and Encore DVD 1.5 serves the needs of artists, but it's also a great marketing strategy. After Effects 6.5 is a measured version with several strong features and two killer features. It's bundled with integrated products from Synthetic Aperture and GridIron.

You can now copy and paste key frames between the applications and edit them in either package. Video Collection applications share plug-ins even when they are present in only one application's plug-in folder. For instance, After Effects will detect Premiere Pro plug-ins (and vice versa) and display them in the effects palette (Windows only). Effects sharing was available last year, but this only makes the new key frame-sharing feature more complete.

Other features of the Premiere Pro and After Effects integration include: Transferred Clips keep its folder hierarchy; Premiere Pro sequences can be brought into After Effects as Compositions, including any nested sequences; and Premiere Pro motion properties also travel well, with translation, scale, and rotation settings and their key frames all capable of being brought into After Effects.

OpenGL support has been kicked up with a new OpenGL engine. New features include Targeted Preview, which allows the user to select which window to preview. In the past, you were locked into previewing the Comp window only. A related feature is the Video Preview that allows RAM previews to be viewed over FireWire on the display screen of a DV camera.

Other OpenGL improvements enabled by the new render engine are OpenGL renders for RAM previews, more accurate renders for material surfaces, such as Metal, improved rendering of Cone and Direction lighting, and my favorite, OpenGL now displays blend modes. This last improvement makes OpenGL more useful.

Another significant new plug-in — after X-Factor — is the inclusion of Synthetic Aperture's color correction software Color Finesse. A little more than two years ago, several of the top NLEs and compositing products added serious color correction capability. Color Finesse emerged as one of the most highly praised standalone solutions. Adobe made the shrewd decision to include Color Finesse in After Effects 6.5 instead of writing its own color corrector. The bundled version is the latest full version of Color Finesse and has all the features you would expect from a color correction tool, with secondary color correction, virtual scopes, and 16-bit precision.

After Effects' image-editing capabilities are further enhanced by the inclusion of Photoshop's Image Adjustment tools, including Auto Color, Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, and the convenient Shadow/Highlight tool. Photoshop Color Filters are also available in After Effects 6.5 and can be imported from Photoshop as Adjustment layers. From the perspective of color and general image editing, Adobe now offers the most sophisticated set of tools for motion graphics. For indie filmmakers, the digital intermediate becomes not only a correction step in the filmmaking process, but also the single most important formal advance for directors in the digital era.

There are also very powerful Grain filters added to After Effects 6.5, courtesy of Grain Surgery, a plug-in product designed and sold by Jonathan Shekter, one of After Effects' software engineers. Filter acquisition is something of a tradition at After Effects. Over the years, Adobe has purchased some of the leading filter sets and added them to After Effects. This time around, Adobe revives one of the oldest and best-liked filter sets: Cycore (aka Final Effects). More than 60 of the original Final Effects plug-ins are included with After Effects 6.5. Many were rewritten to improve their speed and add spatial interaction with an After Effects camera. Surprisingly, none of the filters has been written for 16-bit rendering. This gives After Effects one of the biggest collections of free, high-quality filters. These filters and any others present in the After Effects plug-in folder are available to Premiere Pro. 1.5.

Animation presets fall into the category of predefined assets. This is a set of text animations that can be dropped into an existing project for instant effects. The presets are completely editable, and customized versions can be saved as new presets. It's also possible to create new assets from scratch. After Effects ships with 250 of these effects and text motion templates. Adobe is likely to encourage the inevitable asset sharing that grows up around prefab effects.

The Clone tool has been refined, including the addition of the useful Clone Source Overlay. This is a semitransparent preview area that lets you position a source over the target area. Previously, when cloning an image you worked blindly until you executed the clone. The Clone Palette also features up to five Clone Presets that store alignment offsets and other settings. This is useful when reusing clone effects or refining previously cloned areas.

There are also improvements to the Paint tool. A Straight Line feature has been added, activated by using click selection and keystrokes to define the start and end point of a line. This can be used for individual strokes or as a single stroke made up of sequentially added segments. Which brings us to one of the downsides of painting over time — you end up laying down a lot of strokes. After Effects 6.5 reduces — slightly — the stroke overhead experienced in version 6 by allowing the Erase tool to work without adding additional strokes in the Timeline. While Adobe has done a very good job of bringing Photoshop functionality into After Effects, dynamic brushes are not implemented in After Effects 6.5.

Other enhancements in After Effects 6.5 include guide layers for aligning images and text. The guides appear in the comp window but do not appear in renders. There are also several new features added to the text engine that debuted in version 6. The interface takes some getting used to, but the ability to create complex animation on a letter-by-letter and group basis is far ahead of any other text animation tools on the market. New Text capabilities include the ability to export text animation as Flash files (.swf), the ability to animate characters in random order, and the ability to animate the anchor point. Text anti-aliasing has also been improved. A new Scripting language permits control of text layers and, along with Expressions, provides an astonishing array of text manipulation options.

Adobe also added customizable colors for the interface, allowing users the opportunity to create a more comely look for After Effects' otherwise plain-Jane look. This is useful during color correction when you want to reduce color contamination of the monitor.

Price

$699 retail price - Standard Edition
$999 retail price - Professional Edition

System Configuration Requirements

Windows
P-III or P-IV processor (multiprocessor recommended)
Windows 2000 (SP 4), XP Pro, XP Home (SP 1)
128MB RAM (256MB or more recommended)
150MB free hard disk space for installation
500MB or larger hard disk or disk array recommended for work
CD-ROM drive
24-bit color display adapter
QuickTime 6.5 software recommended
DirectX 9.0b software recommended

For the Render Engine: System requirements are the same as application system requirements.

For OpenGL support: Adobe After Effects supported OpenGL card.

Macintosh
PowerPC processor (multiprocessor G5 recommended)
Mac OS X v.10.3.2
128MB RAM (256MB or more recommended)
150MB free hard disk space for installation
500MB or larger hard disk or disk array recommended for work
CD-ROM drive
24-bit color display adapter

For the Render Engine: System requirements are the same as application system requirements.

For OpenGL support: Adobe After Effects supported OpenGL card.

Contact

Adobe Systems, Incorporated
Corporate Headquarters
345 Park Avenue
San Jose, California 95110-2704
408-536-6000
800-833-6687
FAX 408-537-6000

Order Online at Adobe Corporation
www.adobe.com/store/main.jhtml

You can also order from other retailers or online vendors.