Depth of Options
Form seems geared towards three main uses, as reflected in the preset groupings: motion backgrounds, lower third animations (these go behind the descriptive text you see at the bottom of the screen during interviews and news broadcasts), and audio-synced animations, although it can also be used for special effects like fire and smoke. It has a very distinct look, so it won’t work for every application, and because it produces such eye-catching results it would have to be used liberally or else it might feel overused quickly. Form also performs more advanced functions that I won't get into, such as layer mapping and warping the image with fractal fields.
I particularly enjoyed the audio syncing, although I’m not quite sure what the practical uses are for it. It does look exceptionally cool, but off the top of my head I can’t think of a way to integrate it into a project. However, I’m sure people more artistic than me will find a ton of creative uses for this feature.
As a lower third background, the animations seemed a little busy and sometimes clashed with the text, but I think this could be rectified by carefully picking the right color font. I think this is a particularly interesting feature, and with some tweaking of colors and transfer modes I could see it being used during a show like Behind the Music. It lends a very dynamic and hip look to what is usually the boring semi-transparent box used in most lower thirds.
But I think Form is at its best as a background animation generator. It creates loops that are unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and they’re really pretty spectacular. I would be tempted to use Form constantly for title sequences. And while I haven’t had a chance to try all the permutations, you can produce even cooler backgrounds by processing them further with Trapcode’s other plugins like Shine or Starglow.
Finally, Form can act as a standard particle generator and do things like making text turn to sand and blow away, and producing fire effects over top of layer maps. While it does this well, these features are common to other particle generators, including Trapcode’s own Particular.
Performance
Depending on the complexity of your animation, Form can render pretty slowly, but this is true of all particle engines. The more particles or lines you have, the slower it will render, mainly because the computer has to keep track of the velocity and trajectory of a bunch of little objects. But I found Form rendered faster than expected on less-complex presets. And as mentioned previously, the miniature preview window in the effect panel is a very useful and fast alternative to performing even draft-quality renders.
