Product ReviewsMultimedia software
It has been some years since development of Adobe's video applications ground to a halt for the Mac platform due to aggressive competition from Apple's Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. Premiere Pro is now a Windows-only application and Adobe's Encore DVD authoring program has never even been considered for the Mac. After Effects is now the company's only video tool that still exists for both platforms, but that's only because Apple hasn't sought to compete. Things might change quickly if Motion receives a 'Pro' makeover, as we recently saw happen with Soundtrack. Even the first incarnation of Final Cut Pro was claimed by many to be a challenger to After Effects, so it would be naive to suppose Apple had no interests in that area. In essence, After Effects is like Photoshop for video. Rather than editing video by constructing a linear sequence of clips laid end-to-end, After Effects builds composites of numerous media feeds running consecutively. Media can be graphics or video, and its combination can be as crude or as subtle and seamless as you want to make it. And it's After Effects' similarity with Photoshop, coupled with its full support for layered Photoshop files and unrendered blending effects, that has kept it ahead of the game compared with Motion, Final Cut and even Discreet's Combustion. Two versions of After Effects are available - Standard and Professional, priced at £664 and £1075 respectively. The extra money buys you advanced keying tools for creating more seamless green-screen composites, as well as a tool for keyframing and animating masks. The Pro version also supports 32-bit HDR and 16-bit colour, high-quality fast and slow-motion effects, image stabilisation, and a 'wiggler' effect for creating the
Regardless of which version you go for, After Effects has received a significant makeover since version 6. The interface is now more orderly and friendly, with tabbed panels that can be unpinned as floating windows or docked with other panels to suit your workflow. The approach brings it in keeping with the look and feel of Premiere Pro and Encore DVD - not that this will make a difference to most Mac users. As with Premiere and Encore, though, you can rearrange the workspace and save your new layouts for future use. Or if you make a mess of the interface, the default is easily restored. After Effects' Timeline is now more intuitive for video editors, and while it's still not ideal for editing tasks, it manages to speak much the same language as mainstream editors such as Final Cut Pro. The Timeline can also be viewed as a graph editor in which keyframes for multiple layers are manipulated over time in a large graphic environment. Manipulation of still images in 3D space is also excellent, enabling some highly complex and impressive title sequences and animations. For those looking for a quick fix and who aren't too fussy about results, version 7 also comes with a selection of animation presets that can be quickly applied to media files. Playback performance of blue-screen and green-screen effects on a dual 2.3GHz G5 PowerPC was good - not quite realtime, but the program has an intelligent approach of rendering only the sections of a project that you play, enabling them to be viewed again at full quality without having to render out the entire effect or sequence. After Effects has never been an easy program to use, partly because the job of effects compositing requires a good deal of pre-planning compared with video editing. The new look of version 7 does make things more intuitive for video editors, however, and its playback performance is impressive, considering the amount of work being done. While its price tag places it well out of reach of many video enthusiasts, After Effects sets the bar very high for anyone with plans to run away with Adobe's crown. By Peter Wells
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