While Adobe has completely upped it's rotoscoping game with the Roto Brush, they did not skimp on other great features for CS5. For the new features it seems that Adobe is steering away from adding flashy gimicky effects and moving exclusively toward top-of-the-line real world motion graphics tools. Despite Adobe's amazing lineage in motion graphics, Apple's Final Cut Studio is still in the lead for editing software solutions and Adobe has clearly set out to take them down. So while After Effects is directly competing with Motion, it is also upping its plugin functionality to compete with Color.
After Effects comes equipped with two full applications: Mocha for After Effects 2, and Color Finesse 3. Mocha for After Effects, introduced in CS4, is a motion tracking and masking suite. And as those of you have read our reviews of the first edition and the new upgraded edition know, it has received a complete overhaul since CS4. With features like single point controls for feather and smoothing; the fine tuning features are unmatched by traditional tracking in After Effects.
Color Finesse 3 is ostensibly Adobe's answer to Apple Color. Of course what's nice about having this as a 'plugin' is that its not always necessary to port into the full suite. In fact there are quite enough quick tools to use from the effects window to greatly improve your images.
In addition to Color Finesse, there are some new quick color correction tools, which have clearly been 'borrowed' from Adobe's Photoshop and Camera RAW options. 'Vibrance' is a quick way to get some nice looking color saturation into your compositions. 'Black and White' gives you control over black and white level balanced based on the original color of the image. This in itself does not sound all that impressive, but when you are working with so many levels of footage, it is nice to have more control over your color other than just clicking 'Monochrome'. Even 'Levels' has been overhauled to include some nice looking histograms.
