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After
Effects 5 Features 3D Compositing Capabilities
by David Nagel
Executive Producer
San Jose, CA --(Feb. 26, 2001)-- Adobe has announced
the forthcoming release of After Effects 5.0, the company's
long-awaited (but still unavailable) update to its video compositing
and effects suite. The new version includes a huge number of
changes, including new 3D compositing capabilities, some new
filters from the company's just-announced acquisition of Cycore's
Cult Effects and 16-bit per channel color support (in the Production
Bundle only). We have exclusive
footage of After Effects 5 (created by our in house production
staff at DMN TV), along with some introductory tutorials from
Total Training and demonstrations of the product from Adobe.
(Please note that the videos will not start playing until they
are fully downloaded.)
We also spoke with After Effects Senior Product Manager Steve
Kilisky from Adobe regarding the new release.
3D compositing
The new version includes dramatic changes from AE 4.1, though
the changes are designed to remain in the background until the
user chooses to employ them. Chief among these changes is 3D
compositing—the ability to manipulate layers and layer data
in 3D, including layer intersections, for adding shadows and
other effects.
At press time, Adobe was in the process of optimization of the
final shipping product. In other words, they've got the product
running (currently in beta) and are now making things operate
faster, particularly 3D rendering.
"3D rendering is definitely more calculation-intensive than
2D rendering," said Kilisky. "Our goal is to be faster
than [Discreet's] Combustion for 3D rendering. This release
is the biggest release we've ever done."
The 3D compositing features are activated on a layer by layer
basis by clicking a box in the timeline. Leaving the 3D features
deactivated on 2D layers will speed up rendering, while also
leaving these layers unaffected by camera or lighting animation.
The checkboxes (highlighted in red) for activating 3D compositing
mode.
The new 3D capabilities were not, as some had expected, the
result of Adobe's acquisition of Canoma from the company formerly
known as MetaCreations. Rather, it was an internal development
from the ground up, according to Kilisky.
The Active Camera view (left) is used to arrange footage. Positions
of layers in space is accomplished through a Custom View (right).
The path of the animated camera is visible on the right.
After Effects 5 introduces several animation features, including
multiple cameras and lights for position, rotation and orientation.
You can also automatically orient 3D layers toward a camera
or animate lights and cameras along a path or toward a point
of interest you define. You have the ability to create an unlimited
number of lights and define each one's properties individually.
You can also edit each light's shadow-casting properties.
You can also specify material properties that define how a light
affects the surface of a layer, as well as how layers interact
with lights. You can define and animate Ambient, Diffusion,
Specular and Shininess values.
On the camera side, you can create multiple cameras, each with
their own individual properties, such as a wide-angle 15 mm
preset or a 200 mm lens.
In addition to standard preset lenses, you can create and save
custom camera presets. The cameras themselves can be animated,
as well as their properties, and you can cut to different cameras
at any time.
The rendering itself is handled by a plugin rendering engine
with basic rendering capabilities. Adobe's Kilisky told us that
an advanced renderer, which will handle antialiased layer intersections,
among other things, will be available in the form of a public
beta the day of After Effects' launch. Adobe is also leaving
its architecture open for third-party developers to create their
own rendering plugins.
Vector painting in the Production Bundle
The new version of After Effects also includes tools for vector
painting, a technology integrated into the program via Adobe's
acquisition of Cycore's Cult Effects package (previously known
as CE Paint). In its latest incarnation, Adobe has added a number
of features, as well as Adobefied the Paint interface.
The nondestructive vector paint tools in After Effects 5 range
from strokes that reveal an image over time to animated cartoons
and painted textures that change from frame to frame. Brush
controls allow the user to specify how the strokes will look,
including radius, color and opacity. Users can also choose whether
strokes are recorded to the current frame, to sequential frames,
in real time or continuously.
Other features of the vector paint tools include:
- Onion
Skin mode for cell-style animations;
- Playback
options for using paint strokes in a variety of ways, including
adjusting mattes and other types of adjustments;
- "Wiggle"
controls provide additional options for creating a hand-animated
look, as well as a variety of special effects;
- Options
for controlling how paint strokes interact with the layer
they appear on.
Paint strokes
can also be used to reveal an underlying image by using the
paint strokes as a track matte, or they could be composited
in the alpha channel of the original image to create an animated
image mask.
More effects
Adobe has also updated the CE Turbulent Noise filter from Cycore
and renamed it Fractal Noise.
Fractal Noise, formerly Cult Effects Turbulent Noise, has been
integrated into the AE 5 Production Bundle.
The Fractal Noise filter is available only in the AE 5 Production
Bundle. Two other filters available only in the Production bundle
are Inner/Outer Key, which allows the user to extract an object
from its background to create accurate keys more easily, and
Optics Compensation, which corrects for lens distortions.
The new Shatter filter in the AE 5 Production Bundle.
New and improved filters in both the production bundle and the
standard version include:
- Shatter,
which extrudes a layer and then demolishes it by breaking
it into shards of glass, puzzle pieces, etc. along an animated
force that creates a shockwave;
- Radio
Waves, which generates radio waves, pond ripples and other
effects that use a repeating shape emitted from a single point
with shapes based on polygons, user-defined masks or image
contours;
- Colorama,
which allows users to apply custom color palettes to a layer
and then cycle through the color wheel to create compositions
with pulsing color;
- Fractal,
used to create animated fractal patterns using Mandelbrot
Julia, or a combination of both sets;
- Vegas,
which outline elements with running lights, flashing pulses
and other path-based effects.
Adobe is
also making five filters freely downloadable from their After
Effects Experts Center on their Web site. They come to Adobe
by way of Atomic Power's Evolution plugin set. Adobe's Kilisky
said the company decided to make them downloads rather than
including them on the CD to add value and to make users aware
of Adobe's new After Effects Expert Center.
The filters include Foam, Wave World, Caustics, Card Wipe and
Card Dance. Foam allows you to create bubbles and control several
of their characteristics, including viscosity and flow. Wave
World creates underwater effects. Caustics simulates light reflected
from the water's surface. Card Wipe and Card Dance allow you
to create transition effects whereby one image is flipped into
another. (Card dance allows you to choreograph the effect.)
Enhanced masking
Also new in After Effects 5 is the ability to create and edit
masks directly in the Comp window. You can also make and edit
masks in the Layer window, as in version 4.1.
Masking
in the Comp window:
- The A
uses negative feathering; the W uses positive feathering.
Version
5.0's masking capabilities have also been expanded to include
edge control, which allows you to assign negative or positive
values to feathering. You can also apply motion blurs to masks
and assign colors to individual masks for easier identification
when multiple masks are used.
Improved previews
There are several new features in After Effects 5 that improve
upon RAM previewing. In the past, any change would cause AE
to recache the entire preview. In the new version, everything
is kept in RAM except the changed frames, which allows for faster
caching.
"After Effects relies heavily on RAM caching," said Kilisky.
"We've dramatically enhanced the way we use RAM."
AE 5 also gives you the ability to select a region of interest
for previewing, showing you just the portion of the composition
you want to see. This allows for faster caching with less RAM
usage.
Other RAM preview improvements include:
- Full-screen
preview mode;
- New playback
options, such as continuous loop, a single segment and a palindrome
mode that runs forward then backward.
- Preset
preview styles, which includes two different sets of RAM preview
options for specifying frame rates and the number of frames
to be skipped.
Also new in the previewing arena is dynamic updating in the
Comp window. Instead of defaulting to a wireframe view when
moving, rotating, scaling or performing other transformations,
After Effects now transforms layers
interactively so that you can see results as you make changes.
If the image can't be updated quickly enough, After Effects
temporarily drops image resolution to maintain optimal interactivity.
Parenting
In After Effects 5, there's a new feature called parenting,
which should be familiar to 3D animators. The concept in AE
is that you can link layers to one another in parent-child relationships
so that transformations on one layer can affect another in a
manner similar to an IK chain.
The examples above use parenting to allow individual objects
(bone segments in this case) to move in relation to one another.
Parent-child relationships aren't limited to footage layers.
You can also define relationships between light and camera layers
in 3D compositions. This allows a camera to track individual
elements in a composition and lights to keep objects illuminated
regardless of their movement.
Establishing parent-child relationships, as in the above example,
is just a matter of dragging a target icon from the source layer
to another layer's parenting column in the timeline.
Getting expressive with Expressions
Another major new feature in After Effects 5 is a scripting
function called Expressions. Expressions are JavaScripts that
allow you to create arbitrary relationships between parameters
for things like procedural-type animations without using keyframes.
With expressions, you can create a live relationship between
the behavior of one property in a composition and the behavior
of almost any other property on any other layer.
For example, you can link the opacity of one layer to the scale
of another, while the tracking of path-based text can be linked
to the rotation of another layer.
To create these types of expressions, you drag the expression
picker from the property that is to be animated to the property
that the animation will be based on. After Effects automatically
creates the expression for you. You can also drag the picker
between the Timeline and Effect Controls windows.
For those familiar with JavaScript, you can also write your
own scripts by defining variables and using other basic JavaScript
programming concepts. There's also a popup list of common After
Effects functions to speed the process and to eliminate errors.
Application integration
On the integration side, Adobe has upped the interoperability
between After Effects 5, Photoshop 6, Premiere 6 and Illustrator
9. In the case of Premiere, Adobe's added new support for embedding
project links in After Effects movies.
If you need to make a change to a movie after you've brought
it into Premiere for editing, use the Edit Original command
in Premiere 6.0 to open the original After Effects project.
After you make your changes, the movie is automatically updated
in Premiere. It also retains settings in the filters common
to AE 5 and Premiere 6 and keeps them editable.
For Photoshop 6, as with AE 4.1, you can import Photoshop layers,
adjustment layers and transfer modes. Now in AE 5, in imported
Photoshop images that use 16 bit color, all color information
is preserved. It also adds support for Photoshop 6's vector
masks. In After Effects 5, these masks appear on the layer they
are applied to and can be manipulated independently.
As with Photoshop, layers from Illustrator 9 files can be preserved.
After Effects 5.0 builds on this integration with support for
preserving transparency settings and transfer modes. It also
adds support for PDF files.
And the rest ...
There are literally hundreds of new features in After Effects
5. Here's a look at some of the other major new features added
in the new version.
For one, After Effects 5 breaks the 2 GB file size limit (on
both Mac and Windows).
AE 5 can also output directly to the Flash format (SWF).
On the interface side, Adobe has added a number of enhancements
Instead of using dialog boxes to change property values, you
can now enter values directly in the Timeline and Effects Control
windows or scrub across a value to interactively preview property
value settings. When you scrub a value, the Comp window updates
dynamically.
A single Import dialog box lets you import footage, Premiere
and After Effects projects and layered Photoshop and Illustrator
files, as well as subsets of a sequence.
Specify a different starting timecode for each composition.
Frequently
used composition settings can be saved as custom presets.
Ability to specify Motion Blur shutter angles up to 720 degrees
for each composition and phase controls that determine when
the shutter opens relative to the start of each frame.
Preview a single layer.
Create and save custom Workspaces.
Change the sequence in which effects are applied to a layer
by dragging to reorder them directly in the Timeline window.
For keyframes, you can drag up or down over more than one stopwatch
to animate multiple properties.
The Effect Controls window now includes stopwatches for setting
keyframes.
The time bar for the active layer now has a textured appearance.
The work area is easier to distinguish from the rest of the
composition, as it
appears white while the rest of the timeline has a subtle gray
background.
Markers can now be locked, and Transfer Modes now appear in
a panel that can be hidden or displayed independently.
Footage window improvements. Preview footage and comps that
use a non-square pixel aspect ratio without distortion by choosing
Pixel Aspect Correction.
QuickTime footage playback is also improved.
Pricing
Adobe says After Effects will be released some time in the second
quarter, not likely before the NAB convention in April. Pricing
on version 5 is $1,499 for the Production Bundle and $649 for
the standard version. Upgrade from the 3.x/4.x Production Bundle
to the 5.0 Production Bundle Cost $299. Upgrades from the 3.x/4.x
standard version to the 5.0 standard version cost $199. The
upgrade from the 3.x/4.x standard version to the 5.0 Production
Bundle costs $499 within the first 120 of version 5.0's release.
French, German and Japanese versions are expected to ship in
the second quarter as well. Pricing and ship dates for these
will be released separately.
For more information, visit http://www.adobe.com.
Also be sure to visit DMN
TV for exclusive QuickTime coverage.
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