With version 5.5, After Effects, Adobe’s motion-graphics powerhouse, continues its move into the 3D world — the only realm left for it to conquer. The new features, and improvements on older ones, certainly increase After Effects usefulness for 3D animators, but Adobe still hasn’t quite taken it all the way.
The big innovation in version 5.0 was true XYZ motion for layers — an essential ability for today’s vertiginous commercial animation. Unfortunately, Adobe had not quite solved the issue of how to render complex 3D intersections among layers with complete accuracy, and you sometimes saw Z-buffer errors, in which one layer did not render properly against another. The new Advanced 3D Renderer takes care of this; choose it over the standard 3D renderer when you want flawless layer interaction.
3D artists will also like the ability to open customizable, orthographic views of the composition space — a quad-view just like the one in your 3D program. Transparent projection layers and colored shadows in 3D comps add stained-glass and slide-show effects. Even better, if you get the Production Bundle — the high-end, high-priced version with better toys — you can import and apply camera-motion data from two of the top 3D animation programs, discreet’s 3ds max and Alias|Wavefront’s Maya. This means you can import footage of a 3D object rendered with a moving camera and add new elements in After Effects 5.5 that remain in perfect visual sync with the moving viewpoint.
After Effects still lacks a high-quality 3D particle system. Its own particles are pretty lame; we still depend on our old copy of KPT Final Effects, a suite of filters now going on six years old. Invigorator, the venerable 3D plug-in included with 5.5, doesn’t do serious particles. And we’re still waiting for the ability to import textured 3D objects (at least from 3ds max and Maya) right in an After Effects comp.
3D features aren’t the only news in version 5.5. In the Production Bundle, the Color Stabilization tool is likely to be the most useful; it fixes footage flicker by correcting errant frames, with plenty of options and tweakability. You can now keyframe color corrections as well. (We wish After Effects would copy the incredible new color controls in Apple’s Final Cut Pro 3.)
After Effects’ well-honed interface remains an exemplary machine for channelbased keyframing, and this version has smoothed away a few lingering rough spots. You can now organize plug-in menus your own way in the new Effects palette, and drag an effect from the palette onto the Comp window, the Timeline, or a layer’s Effects Control window. Another time-saver: The program now renders and saves frames to disk asynchronously, meaning that it can start rendering the next frame while saving the last one to disk. When you’ve got 50,000 frames to render and a tight deadline, that could make all the difference.
Need input? After Effects 5.5 takes in just about everything, now including Flash SWF. Want output? Adobe has added RealMedia support, so you can generate RealVideo and RealAudio files for Web streaming with all the usual parameters, including searchable keywords.
After Effects has dominated the desktop compositing market forever — deservedly so — and it’s still the champ. Version 5.5 is well worth your investment. But After Effects’ undisputed reign may not last much longer. As we wrote this review, Apple announced that it had purchased Nothing Real, developers of Shake, the Emmy-winning postproduction tool many of the top effects houses favor. It won’t be long until we see a Mac OS X version of Shake. We hope the After Effects development team is up to the challenge.
Anzovin, Steven, Anzovin, Raf. (May 2002). After Effects 5.5. MacAddict. (pgs. 48-49).
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Applications
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2020-09-13 / 
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AdobeAfterEffects55.toast_.bz2
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
