Software
Review: Adobe Production
Studio Premium, Pg. 4
After
Effects 7 Professional
One of the big new additions to After Effects 7 Professional
is the Graph Editor that allows you to create a visual
representation of your animation and multiple layers
at once, with each layer represented by a different
color. This allows you to adjust curves, speed, and
other facets of your animation in a very simple to view
manner. Additionally, After Effects 7 Professional
also supports 32-bit HDR color, which allows you to
apply effects at an amazingly realistic level (if you
happen to have enough computer power to play with the
size of images it generates at that level, that is!).
AE7 also has Open GL support which allows you
to speed up pre-rendering and rendering up to 3 times
in many situations with a powerful enough GPU. (Open
GL is a bit error prone, so this is helpful in certain
situations but not as much as I would have liked.)
The
new Timewarp and subsequent Pixel Time effect are great
new additions for creating slow-mos from normally captured
footage, as they will actually create integrated frames
that look much more like you shot the original footage
at 60 fps. This is not perfect, because the program
looks at picture change and, if there's too much change,
just meshes the frames in the typical ghosting manner.
However, in a number of cases, with a little experimentation,
this really does look quite good!
Another
very cool addition to After effects are the Lens
Blurs and Smart Blurs that we've grown to love in Photoshop.
Lens blurs in After Effects are especially cool
because they can be key framed in to make it look like
you rack focused on your main subject when you originally
shot the footage. Smart blurs can help clean up many
images by blurring the less defined areas, like skin,
while leaving the high-contrast details intact, like
facial features.
Encore
DVD 2 Encore now boasts
a number of nice new features, including a more stylistic
slide show feature (that will make it much easier to
show off those behind-the-scenes photos you have in
a cool manner) and a new Chapter Playlist feature. This
last feature is especially cool for filmmakers since
it will actually allow you to reference new content,
such as deleted scenes, without having to create a separate
.AVI for everything. Basically, if you use this, you
can have an option for viewers to watch the DVD with
deleted scenes in the appropriate places without having
to make two different versions of your film! Additionally,
you can now throw multiple .AVI's on a single timeline
to put in trailers or other information before your
films and you can now also use a flowchart to precisely
map out your DVD to make sure all your menus are easy
to navigate.
Audition
2
The new low-latency mixing engine gives you much more
precise control over audio and the ability to hear changes
more accurately. (Plus, it also supports ASIO hardware
acceleration to make things even more instantaneous.)
Additionally, you can now 'scrub' through audio and
find hard to locate segments in both tape style scrubbing,
which simulates analog tape playback, and shuttle style
scrubbing, which simulates searching through audio with
a jog shuttle. The improved spectral display options,
which give a truly multi-dimensional image of sound
waves, are out of this world too, making it very easy
to target certain frequencies for elimination. I would
think it would especially appeal to those who are visually
oriented, but I found it to be a revealing way to look
at what I was hearing as well.
Enhanced
support for video files allows you to bring in movie
files for final mixing and touchups in .avi, .mpeg,
.wmv, and quicktime formats. New non-destructive automation
lanes for audio allow you to record live changes in
the mix of music, special effects, and dialogue and
then play it back to get final confirmation before proceeding.
When you're done mastering your soundtrack, you can
kick it back into Premiere Pro without having
to alter your video, to make sure you don't get off
sync.
I
also really liked the effects grouping options in Audition
2. As someone who has at least 100 effects come
up in his list of plugins and is constantly mousing
around pop-up panels to find the right effect, I really
appreciate this feature and hope other manufacturers
take note! I found Audition 2 to be very easy
to navigate, although the scroll bar at the top of the
Main panel gets really touchy when zoomed in and I couldn't
find an option to "go to beginning of selection" at
all. Aside from those two minor things, the new version
of Audition is very impressive.
