Adobe After Effects is a highly sophisticated 2D special effects
program designed for motion picture, video, broadcast and multimedia.
September 27, 1997
It can basically be divided into four areas of image manipulation. It allows the user to:
create multi-layer composites for achieving various keying, matting effects, etc.
perform two dimensional animation on still and moving images.
accomplish time-varying special effects such as backwards motion and time stretching, etc. (without the typical stuttering or jerkiness of most other quicktime-based video manipulation applications.).
design Photoshop-quality effects to stills, graphics or video clips that can metamorphose over time.
After Effects works well with Adobe Premiere, Movie Player or any other Quicktime-based application. It is also capable of directly importing Illustrator and Photoshop graphic files, as well as pict, tiff, IMAGE, targa and filmstrip files. After Effects can even import and basically manipulate audio files. (info on the PC version of After Effects unavailable at time of writing)
An experienced Premiere user might ask, "Why should I use After Effects when I have keying, transitions, text, and image manipulation features within Premiere already?" The answer is simple - quality and sophistication. The compositing effects, for example, are much cleaner and lend much more control than those of Premiere. (not unlike the difference between driving a Lear jet and a bumper car.). Traveling masks and mattes have much more sophisticated controls as well, allowing the user to create far higher quality designs.
Also, text manipulation is far more flexible (those of you who have struggled with the extremely limited text animation features of Premiere will heartily agree!). For example, let's say you want to create a perspective tail credit crawl at the end of your piece (like in the beginning of "Star Wars"). In Premiere, you can create a long page of text under File> Title. But you can only work with one line at a time in the text animation subheading, which means you have to separately create and animate every line. (hope your client brought a good long book, like Anna Karenina). An alternative is to use a combination of Image Pan, Mesh Warp and a tailored filter made in Filter Factory to try to get the subtle 3-D effect of the credits crawling off into space. You can alternatively create the titles in another program like Illustrator, save as pict, and import into Premiere. The trouble with that is however big you made the file in Illustrator, Premiere will convert it to what ever aspect ratio your project settings are. So now you have to use the resize filter. Plus, if you want to change one letter of your credits, you have to go back to Illustrator, fix it, resave as pict, and re-import the file. It might be easier to just shoot the titles, but again, any changes, and you have to reshoot the titles. (Haven't we just defeated the purpose of digital post?!) Meanwhile, your client has finished the book and grows cranky.
In After Effects, creating this animated text is pretty simple. Text can be created directly within After Effects via Effects>Text>Basic text. Granted you don't have a whole lot of parameters designing text layout, so for advanced design, you'll fare much better designing in something like Illustrator and importing that file. The good thing about After Effects is it won't resize your outside-built file. If you made your file 2,000 pixels high in Illustrator, by Jove it will still be that size in After Effects! This means if you want to build a single page of credits and have them scroll, all you need to do is create the page taller than your output aspect ratio, set a position anchor point at the beginning of the time line, move to the end of the time line, set a second position achor point and voila´´- your credits scroll. Now, without having to even render that composition, you can add the 3D effect by simply choosing Effect>Perspective>Basic 3D. Tweak the swivel and tilt controls to your liking and render the movie. (Throw in a little starfield on a layer behind and really impress your pals!) After Effects can even output your movie to a film recorder to make actual motion pictures. (The easiest way I know to get your name on the big screen).
Another very handy timesaving feature of After Effects is its ability to allow the user to import multi-layered images from Photoshop, one layer at a time. Each layer can be manipulated separately to achieve a highly complex orchestration of moving, changing elements. Other features include multi-composites, keying, distortion, animation (of stills, text, graphics or even another movie), and the familiar effects used in Photoshop such as unsharp mask, Gaussian blur, glow, twirl, spherize, ripple, emboss and much more.
The main screen in After Effects is comprised of the Project window, a Composition window and a Time layout window. Palettes include tools, info, time controls, and audio (level sliders). The time layout window is somewhat similar to Premiere's construction window or the score window in Macromedia's Director. It allows you to view all the pieces of your composition and edit the various parameters of each effect within each piece.
The Composition window is basically a preview window. It allows you to view the changes you're making and offers a few cool features of its' own, like scaling your view, taking a snap shot of individual frames (very nice for reference), viewing RGB and Luma channels separately, and toggling between 'safe action' and 'safe title' frames, as well as an adjustable grid guide for aligning. By simply snapping on the safe title frame, you can easily assure your logo is safely within the lines. One of the best advantages of this preview window over Premiere, (and most other digital video editing software), is the ability to move, resize, tweak, etc, the image directly, with the use of the tools palette, instead of having to go to some other window to do it. For example, let's say you have a simple picture-in-picture situation. You suddenly decide the smaller picture would look much better at the bottom of the screen instead of the top. It's a simple matter of highlighting the clip in the time layout window, grabbing it with the mouse and dragging it to the bottom of the composition window. Click on the grid guides and fine-tune your new position with the arrow keys, and you're done.
The Project window contains information such as the length of the project, the frame size, frames per second, the type of composition, its file size and path, and if applicable, audio specs as well. Double clicking on a file within the Project window opens the file for easy previewing.
After Effects allows the number of frames per second to be adjusted for film or video, both in American and European formats. This is easily done in Composition Settings, under the Composition menu. You can also adjust the number of undoable actions and change the shutter angle, if desired, to create interesting motion blur effects that can give video a more film-like appearance.
A simple project I recently whipped out in After Effects for a tight deadline consisted of scanning a company logo, and producing a clean image of that logo, to be composited into the last scene of a 30 second commercial. To achieve this I first scanned the printed art into Photoshop from a flatbed scanner and saved it as a Photoshop file. I then created a new composition in After Effects and imported the file. Next I imported the last scene of the commercial from Premiere. After dragging the logo and the last scene from the Project Window into the Composition Window I chose the Luma Key Effect from the Effects Menu, making sure the logo was highlighted. I then simply adjusted the threshhold and tolerance sliders of the effect until its background disappeared. A slight adjustment of the feather slider cleaned up the edges nicely to give me a clean logo superimposed over the last scene clip. After rendering a movie, I imported it back to Premiere and outputted the final commercial to tape. (note: For those of you interested in advanced excellent keying, I highly recommend getting the Ultimatte plug-in for After Effects.)
The only real shortcomings noted were its' inability to import cross platform files such as SGI,Unix, or IBM and the unavoidable wait for the software to render your effects before they can be viewed in real time. Even with a 200mhz Power PC and 128 megs of RAM, I am still forced to wait, (the bane of all computer designers!). Also, I wish I could resize the palettes to make the workspace a little more efficient. Nevertheless, Adobe After Effects is an extremely powerful and sophisticated tool that can do about anything you can imagine in 2D animation, keying, time varying effects, and image effects. It is not, however, an easily mastered application. The Adobe manual is pretty essential to familiarize yourself with the layout - you'll probably find it to be pretty slow-going at first, but hang in there, it's definitely worth the learning curve! I also recommend the tutorial 'Adobe After Effects Class Room in a Book.' It's an excellent source of instruction and info. For those without a solid background in film and/or video editing, as well as computers, I suggest Adobe Premiere's more basic digital video editing program as a place to begin.
Other places to go for After Effects info are Adobe on AOL (keyword Adobe), After Effects Fax on Demand @ (206) 628-5737, After Effects Customer Service @ (800) 833-6687, and WWW.Adobe.com
Devin Rice is a freelance Multimedia Designer living in St. Petersburg, Fl. He has been in the entertainment industry for nearly two decades, and enjoys a wide variety of design challanges, from feature films, televisions series, and commercials, to the vast new world of multimedia and Internet Arts. His video/multimedia studio is driven by a Powermac 9500/200 with a Media 100 non/linear editing system.
