After Effects is a dream machine. It can take ordinary scenes and turn them into extraordinary scenes. With the right library of effects, it can take a scene shot under one condition and make it appear as if it were shot under entirely different conditions. The options that ship with After Effects, including the new Mocha for AE CS4 tracker, make it one of the best investments for filmmakers that want to get big-picture looks without big-picture prices. And it is a professional tool with the features necessary to make it integral to almost every production house.
The depth of options in both AE CS4, as well the entire CS4 Production Premium package, bring us back to the question of whether to buy/upgrade just After Effects or to go ahead and move into the full Production Premium. Honestly, although I have constantly used After Effects over the years, I had given up on Adobe Premiere and moved to Final Cut Studio years ago. In the old days, Premiere had a reputation for three things: (1) Insufficient features, (2) Unstable code, and (3) Paid Upgrades instead of fixed defects. A number of years back, Adobe completely rewrote the code for Premiere and created Premiere Pro, a PC-exclusive program until the CS3 release finally made it available for both Mac and PC. As I've worked more with Premiere Pro CS4 while I've reviewed After Effects CS4, I've seen enough improvement in it that I've got to say that I'm willing to give the Premiere franchise another shot. And that’s something I thought I’d never say!
After Effects CS4 performed exceptionally well on my Intel Mac system and handled rendering of complex layered projects in a reasonable time. Another “behind the scenes” feature of AE CS4 is that it has a more efficient way of presenting images, so that, based on your zoom level, it does not render to the screen pixels that are not visible. (Essentially, if you're watching a 33% magnification of your footage, then AE only renders the 33% of the pixels that are directly visible to you. If you increase it to 100%, then AE is rendering 100% of the pixels since they're all visible to you.)
AE CS4 crashed two times while I was testing it, but, even so, it gracefully exited and didn't require a hard reboot. When I re-launched and tried the same activity again, it did not crash, which leads me to believe it was a random occurrence, perhaps a memory leak or race condition. It’s a new product which I tested without any of the new updates/patches and I put it through a lot, so this really is nothing negative to note.
Mocha AE hung my computer twice while I was using it, requiring me to force a hard reboot by holding the power button. That’s pretty rare for a Mac in my experience, so hopefully this little bug will get addressed in a new update.
The value of After Effects as a program is obvious. The value of upgrading to CS4 from an earlier version or upgrading to a Creative Suite package depends on your personal circumstance. Would you pay $300 to upgrade only the stand-alone features(especially since the Mocha-AE program costs $300 by itself)? Would you use the interoperation features? What I can tell you, and have hopefully demonstrated here, is that more money buys A LOT more value with CS4.
After Effects CS4 is not a traditional upgrade. This is primarily a workflow and usability upgrade that points in a new direction of greater integration between applications. The features and design that went into this release are superb. A number of the features are clearly aimed at integrating AE CS4 into professional workflows for larger clients. The most likely filmmaker to purchase AE CS4 is someone who already does a lot of effects work. For someone that does only an occasional simple effect, the differences from prior versions of AE are not that great. On the other hand, f you do a lot of effects work, this version can improve your efficiency tremendously.
