In the “fun but maybe not necessary” category are the Puppet tool, Shape Layers, and Brainstorm. The Puppet effect lets you animate a 2D image by putting pins on the “joints” of the people/things in your photos, and then moving those pins to animate the layer. So if you have a picture of a guy standing, you can stick pins on his knees, elbows, feet, hands, and head, and then make him do a little dance. It’s fun, but I can’t really think of too many situations where I’d personally use it.. (Editor Jeremy Hanke saw this used with sliced images to create very complex animation, so it’s evident that animators could find this useful if they have the patience to master it.)
Shape Layers and Brainstorm go hand-in-hand for me. Shape Layers is sort of a mini version of Illustrator that you can use to make vector shapes within AE. Being a terrible artist, this tool is not very useful for me. If you’re a good artist, however, you could use it to create and animate logos totally within AE, without ever having to open Illustrator. Fortunately for me, AE provides various warp tools for shape layers such as twist, zig-zag, and pucker that can be used to make basic shapes more interesting. They also provide the Brainstorm function, which will show you a bunch of randomly generated ways in which your shape can be changed. You can set it to randomize as few or as many parameters as you want, so if you like the color but aren’t happy with the shape, it’ll just change the shape. This is great for non-artistic people like me who would like some cool backgrounds and visual eye-candy for promos and title sequences, but who don’t have the talent to create such things. Now I can just draw a rough sketch of sorts, and let the Brainstorm tool do the rest. When I see something I like, I just deselect that parameter, and keep on letting it do its thing with the other parameters. Keep in mind that Brainstorm can be used on any effect, not just Shape Layers, so the possibilities for exploring cool new designs really are endless!
Now, with that said, there are some additional improvements I would like to see in the CS4 version of After Effects.
To begin with, I’d love to see the Dynamic Link expanded in CS4 to permit Premiere Pro sequences to be updated in After Effects. I would love to be able to open a Premiere Pro project in After Effects, do a bunch of color correction, go back into Premiere Pro to re-arrange some shots, and then go back into AE and have it update those changes. It’s easy to open Premiere Pro projects in AE, but any further changes you make to that Premiere Project are not reflected in AE. (Obviously, you can copy and paste directly between AE and Premiere Pro, but this isn't as flexible as allowing Dynamic Link to work in reverse.)
An improvement along the same lines, would be to fix the text import issue between Premiere Pro and AE. As it is right now, when you import a Premiere Project into AE, the titles don’t show up! It’s just a black screen where your title should be. I’m not sure why Adobe didn’t address this issue in After Effects 7 and Adobe Production Studio Premium, but it’s still here in After Effects CS3 and CS3: Production Premium. Hopefully it’ll get corrected in CS4.
Performance
Considering their restrictive hardware requirements, Adobe has pretty much guaranteed that After Effects CS3 will run pretty well on any machine you can install it on. AE has always been a RAM and CPU hog, and this version is no different. The better your hardware, the faster your compositions will preview and render. Love it or hate it, rendering is still a fact of life with After Effects.
Now, one very nice feature in After Effects CS3 is the inclusion of the Nucleo direct rendering engine, which is based on Grid Iron's standalone software that highly accelerates rendering performance in multi-processor and multi-thread machines, as well as Intel Macs. (Now, as you might expect, the inclusion of Nucleo's direct rendering engine, doesn't include all the features of the full Nucleo Pro 2, which sports an impressive background processing option, useful speculative rendering option, and the ability to accelerate rendering in 3D programs like Lightwave and 3D Studio Max.) Plus, After Effects can now recognize much more RAM than it could in the past, so folks using x64 environments can really bump the speed up with large RAM packages.
