It was seven years ago when I got my first look at After Effects. I’d heard people talking about it like it was the nirvana of filmmaking, and something that everyone involved in video production should know how to use. So I went to Adobe’s website and looked at their promo video, and all I saw was some Pixar-esque animation of a car flying around. I thought it was cool, but it wasn’t anything I would use in my video projects, so I said “meh” and forgot about After Effects for a few years.
In 2002 I started making movies again on a regular basis. Previously I’d always edited on a tape-to-tape ¾” machine, but now I’d decided to get into digital filmmaking, so I bought a crappy MiniDV camera and hooked it up to my computer. My capture card came with a copy of Adobe Premiere Pro, so that’s what I used to edit. It seemed pretty intuitive, so I stuck with it, but eventually I became annoyed at its limitations. First of all, there was no way to make titles that were even vaguely interesting; I kept seeing lots of cool title sequences in commercials and movies, and knew they couldn’t have been made in Premiere Pro. Secondly, the color correction tools were basically non-existent, and my crappy camcorder needed all the help it could get. And finally, the slow motion and resizing tools produced awful results. How’s a guy gonna do a Rodriguez rip-off without good slow-mo, or make a great documentary without the “Ken Burns” pan and zoom effect? I figured there had to be a better program that could help me with these tasks, so I started typing stuff in Yahoo (we didn’t have Google back then) and guess what kept popping up? Yep, After Effects.
So I gave in and got version 5.5, along with the Classroom in a Book. Unlike most people who dive into those books and then lose interest after a few pages, I actually went through the whole course and did all of the tutorials and projects. By the end, I really knew how to use the program, and more importantly I realized that it is so much more than a tool for making 3D objects fly around the screen. Quite frankly, now I couldn’t make a movie without it. I’ve used it in conjunction with Premiere Pro for every project I’ve done since 2003, and have created many promo spots using just AE alone.
In fact, I use AE so much that I simply don’t have the time or energy to deal with the bugs and new workflows usually associated with upgrades. AE 6.5 was working great for me, and, as the improvements in 7.0 weren’t as essential to me, I skipped over it. I figured that, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? But when CS3 came out with its amazing upgrades and integration with the new Photoshop CS3 Extended and Premiere Pro CS3, I knew I needed to fully explore the new package, so I bit the bullet and performed the upgrade. As a writer for Microfilmmaker Magazine, this gave me the perfect place to try it out and share my in-depth review of the package with all the other micro-budget filmmakers that frequent our pages.
With that said, here’s what I found:
Ease Of Use
For a new user, After Effects will still present a steep learning curve. The closest program I’ve seen to it is Flash, which is also a bit difficult to learn. But the basic idea is that you have layers of video, still footage, text, or whatever, and you can put those layers on top of each other in various ways. It’s like Photoshop mixed with Premiere Pro. Unlike past versions of Photoshop, however, you can set keyframes which will allow you to change parameters of each layer over time. (I say past versions of Photoshop, because Photoshop CS3 Extended can also manipulate video and keyframe certain parameters.) You can make your video get bigger, or your text move around the screen, or your still footage fade in opacity, etc. Pretty much everything in After Effects can be keyframed, making it a very powerful tool, but also a very complex one. I’d highly recommend running through the included tutorials to learn the basics, and I’d also recommend the Adobe Press’ Classroom in a Book or Total Training’s line of DVD and online training for bringing your skills to a higher level.
