Software
Review: After Effects CS3 Professional, Pg. 2
For an experienced user like myself, the best thing I can say for this new version’s Ease of Use is that there was no learning curve in the jump from 6.5 to CS3, and there also weren’t any major bugs or crashes. I dived right in and was able to do my work with little hassle. As far as new features go, the dockable windows (which were released in AE 7) bothered me because I use two monitors and couldn’t get them to go where I wanted, but it was easy to just undock all of the windows for a return to my 6.5 layout. Shape Layers were very simple to use, as was the Brainstorm tool. They both worked exactly as described. The animated text feature was not as intuitive as I’d hoped; for some reason they don’t just let you select individual letters and animate them separately. You have to select a numeric “range” of letters for each property you want to modify, and it wasn’t immediately obvious how to do this. I also tested the new Puppet tool, which after some trial and error worked pretty well. From the promos, it looked as if you could just take a picture, add some points, and start moving your object around like a puppet. But even after judiciously using the starch tool, the background behind the person in the picture deformed in an unusable manner. I then realized that the puppet tool is designed for alpha channeled stills that have the background removed. Once I realized I had to totally erase the background to avoid this, I did so and got it to work fairly well, but still had difficulty avoiding getting some funky results.
However, for users who buy this as part of the Prouction Premium package, I did run into some issues with the installation on laptops. I first tried to install it on my laptop, and was told it wouldn’t install because I didn’t have enough RAM. Okay, fair enough. I guess 512MB isn’t really suitable for video work. So I tried loading it on another laptop with 1GB of RAM. This time, the installation ran, but for whatever reason it kept halting ¾ the way through. I restarted the installation a few times, but the only way to get it to stop halting was to not install the software that was hanging it up (Adobe Encore). I never was able to get the CS3 Production package to fully install on that laptop. Finally, I put it on my video workstation, and was promptly told that it wouldn’t install because my processor (a fairly speedy AMD XP3200+) didn’t support SSE2 instructions! I ended up having to buy a new motherboard, a new processor, and a new video card just to get the software to install!!! So please be aware of the hardware requirements if you’re on a tight budget; it’s very picky, and unlike most software, it’ll just halt installation if you don’t meet their requirements.
Another nit-pick with the installation was that it didn’t recognize my 6.5 plugin folder. I had to manually copy all of my plugins to the new version’s folder. I wish that Adobe would include a migration tool to auto-migrate plugins when they changed the plugin layout.
An example of the new 3D Animated Text Feature.
Depth Of Options
For this section I’ll mostly concentrate on the new features in this version.
However, before I go into the new features, I do want to comment on a feature that was introduced in Adobe Production Studio Premium with After Effects 7 and Premiere Pro 2: Adobe Dynamic Link. As a long time user of After Effects without this great feature, I feel it necessary to just comment on how awesome it is. Now I can bring a finished AE project into Premiere Pro and chop it into bits, but all of the color correcting I worked so hard on in AE will still show up properly. I can also bring in completed special effects shots from After Effects without having to render them, which is great. Sometimes I’d finish an FX shot, put it into my timeline, and realize it didn’t cut together right for some reason (shadows wrong, color mismatched, too long, etc), and so I’d have to go back to AE and fix it and then re-render the whole shot. Now, no re-rendering is necessary. I just go back and fix it and the update shows up in Premiere Pro immediately. Likewise, I can use Dynamic Link to go straight into Encore, where I can use AE compositions as backgrounds and other useful items. As Dynamic Link is only found in the version of After EffectsCS3 Pro that comes with CS3: Production Premium, allow this to be my plug for getting the CS3: Production Premium.
With that said, let’s move on to completely new features.
One extremely cool new feature in CS3 for creative filmmakers is the Vanishing Point Exchange feature. This is actually a new feature of Photoshop CS3 Extended but it ties directly into After EffectsCS3 Professional. In Photoshop CS2, Vanishing Point was introduced, which allowed you to extend a perspective layer of flat objects, like buildings, and clone or paint along that layer. Terribly useful for folks that wanted to extend walls, buildings, and fences, the old version was a big hit. However, in PCS3 Extended, they took this to a new level by allowing vanishing point planes to be connected as an actual 3D model with the underlying photo as the “skin” of the model. From here, the model can be exported directly from Photoshop CS3 Extended as the new Vanishing Point Exchange format (or as a .3DS format, if you want to take it to a standalone 3D program), which can be imported directly into After EffectsCS3 Professional. Once imported into After EffectsCS3 Professional, you can light, rotate, and animate the model directly. Done properly, this can allow you to create full 3D constructs of buildings which can be panned around and zoomed in on. I could definitely see this done so that the viewer zooms in on one of the windows which has cleverly been replaced with a video pane of a film’s opening scene. This would be a very cool way to commence a film after the credits.
Another really nice update is the ability to animate individual 3D characters in a line of text. Say I’m making a promo for Microfilmmaker Magazine, and I want the two “m”s in the middle to flip around, but the rest of the 3D text to stay still. Previously if I wanted to do this I’d have to create a two layers: one that said “Microfil aker” and one that said “mm”. Then I’d have to line them up exactly and animate the “mm” layer. But now I can just type out the full line of text, select the two “m”s (via an admittedly non-intuitive process), and animate them separately.
