With After Effects 4.0 — the new version of Adobe Systems’ motion-graphics, compositing, and 2D animation software for film, video, and multimedia postproduction — Adobe completes the task of upgrading all its market-leading applications. After Effects users had to wait nearly four years, but perhaps that’s not so bad when you consider that After Effects 3 was so advanced, dependable, and versatile that it became, well, indispensable.
But times have changed. With all the new hardware-accelerated compositing and painting tools out there, After Effects is no longer the only game in town. Luckily, Adobe hasn’t ignored the challenges: After Effects 4.0 incorporates much of what its competitors offer, while also addressing version 3’s most obvious shortcomings.
Adobe sells After Effects 4.0 in two versions: the standard retail package for $995 and the Production Bundle for $2,195. The Production Bundle includes additional plug-ins aimed mainly at video and film professionals. A hardware key is required to run the Production Bundle plug-ins, but no dongle is needed for the standard package.
As a composition program, After Effects is unmatched. It allows you to assemble and animate layers of QuickTime movies, numbered sequences of PICTs, and files from Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere, and other apphcations rapidly. It can nest compositions (called “comps”) within each other, allowing you to build and track complex interrelations between layers and effects easily. Moreover, After Effects still has the best timeline interface in the business. Many mundane After Effects features are surprisingly smart: For example, if you move one of the source files (such as movies, images, or sounds) in an After Effects project to another folder. After Effects automaticahy recognizes and remembers the change, even if it was not running at the time.
After Effects has long retained a slightly non-Adobe air, a legacy of its roots in now-defunct CoSA. After Effects 4.0 now sports the standard Adobe look and feel, with such previously unavailable niceties as docking palettes and tabbed windows. The downside for longtime users is that many of After Effects 3’s key equivalents have been changed, but anyone who’s been through a few Adobe upgrades ought to expect that by now.
More important, After Effects is now more tightly integrated with other Adobe products, especially Photoshop and Premiere. It preserves adjustment layers and layer effects when you import layered Photoshop files as comps, and many After Effects tools, such as the Pen tool, now work just as they do in Photoshop. You can also import layered Illustrator files, with strokes and gradient meshes preserved. But the best new integration feature is that Premiere 5.x projects now come into After Effects comps as individual layers, with each layer arranged in the appropriate sequence in the Time Layout window. This feature eliminates the time-wasting need to compile clips in Premiere before moving them into After Effects.
Another time-wasting problem from After Effects 3 — Ihe inability to see a comp play back in real time — no longer exists in version 4.0. Taking a tip from Puffin Designs’ Commotion, After Effects now quick-renders frames into RAM and plays them back as fast as your Mac can handle. Naturally, the speed of your machine and the amount of RAM available for After Effects limits this capability.
When you’re ready to render, a well-designed render queue lets you output several versions of the project in one step — for example, a D-1 version for broadcast video, a 320 by 240 version for CD-ROM, and a 120 by 90 version for the Web. You can specify output in NTSC, PAL, or SECAM, and use 3:2 pulldown/removal to convert the 29.97 fps rate of NTSC video to the 24 fps rate of motion-picture film. After Effects 4.0 exports animated GIFs, too. Moviemakers who must mix different motion graphics media — such as composite video, computer animation, and digitized film footage — will especially appreciate After Effects’ high level of control over video field ordering.
The inadequacy of After Effects 3’s masking tools plagued the program’s users. After Effects 3 allowed you to draw a Bezier mask on any layer, making any nonmasked areas transparent, but it permitted only one mask per layer, which was often inadequate for complex masking jobs. Also, animated interpolations between very different masking shapes yielded unpredictable results.
With the new masking tools, you can not only create up to 128 named masks on one layer, but also import masks from Photoshop or Illustrator and edit them the same way you would in those programs. You can make masks interact via Boolean operations and use them with effects plug-ins. The Reshape plug-in (included in the Production Bundle) amply demonstrates this ability; Reshape allows you to apply complex transforms defined by the mask shape directly to an image. Interpolation between dissimilar mask shapes is also more accurate and predictable.
Adobe has also improved the way After Effects uses and applies effects. In After Effects 3, a blur could never extend beyond the edge of a layer, and this often resulted in an odd boundary’ effect. After Effects 4.0 has an expanded effects buffer and allows effects to spread beyond the boundary of the original layer. Likewise, Adobe has upgraded the color correction tools to match those in Photoshop, including the addition of the long-awaited Curves filter.
Some of After Effects 4.0’s most important new features are available only in the Production Bundle. These indude particle animation tools, audio filters, enhanced motion tracking, and warping tools that rival those in dedicated warping and morphing programs (see the sidebar “Warp Factor Dennis”).
In creating the new Particle Playground filter, Adobe wisely steered away from competing directly with the popular but complex 3D particle system plug-ins available in ICE’s Final Effects Complete. Instead, After Effects’ easy-to-use partide animation nicely complements FEC’s effects. For example, you can make any layer into a particle, or use the gray-scale value of another layer to affect the way the particles move. FEC lacks these abilities. Our sole complaint with Particle Playground is that you can only turn the particle systems on and off by toggling their vdocity or partide size setting to zero.
After Effects has never been known as an audio-editing tool, but version 4.0’s new audio abilities may change that. The standard version includes an Audio palette with VU meters, as well as filters for stereo mixing, bass and treble adjustment, and other common tasks. The Production Bundle adds a parametric EQ, plus echo, tone, reverb, chorus, and flange.
Which is right for you — the standard package or the Production Bundle? The standard package is a good deal, especially with the new RAM playback, but Adobe saved many of the coolest new features for the Production Bundle. If you’re able to shell out the additional $1,200, the Production Bundle does practically everything you could ask of a compositing program and more. Either way, After Effects 4.0 is still the one indispensable tool for motion graphicists.
Anzovin, Steve, Anzovin, Raf. (June 1999). Adobe After Effects 4.0. MacAddict. (pgs. 50-52).
Adobe Systems, Inc.
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ae4mac-classic.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
