Appletell reviews Adobe After Effects CS5

Category: Video compositing/effects
Developer: Adobe
System Requirements: Multicore Intel processor with 64-bit support, Mac OS X v10.5.7 or v10.6, 2GB of RAM, 4GB of available hard-disk space plus 2GB of space for optional content; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on a volume that uses a case-sensitive file system or on removable flash-based storage devices), 1280×900 display with OpenGL 2.0–compatible graphics card, DVD-ROM drive, QuickTime 7.6.2 software required for QuickTime features, Broadband Internet connection required for online services
Review Computer: 2.2GHz 13″ Macbook Pro, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM
Processor Compatibility: Intel only
Price: $999 (standalone) $299 (upgrade) or as part of Adobe Creative Suite 5
Availability: Out now

After Effects is a program that allows you to do pretty much anything to video. You can alter time, warp reality, change lighting, or make that light saber video you secretly dream about (it’s okay, everyone does it). It’s an extremely powerful program with a steep learning curve that’s about more than just special effects, but also about manipulating video in the same way Photoshop manipulates images.

I’ve often been stunned by what I can accomplish with AE (after a few tutorials), but now, with CS5, Adobe is starting to push their pro-level apps into a new realm of ease-of-use and time saving.

For my money, the biggest change in AE (other than under-the-hood stuff like 64-bit processing) is the Rototool. This tool goes beyond “useful” and into the realm of “magical.” A combination of the Mask tool and Photoshop’s Magic Wand, you can use the Rototool to quickly—and I mean quickly—isolate elements from video. How does it work? You open the layer, select the tool, and draw a line through the center of the object. You don’t trace the outline, you just draw a line through it. AE then figures out what you want it to isolate, and does a pretty good job of it, I must say. If you need to select more of the object, draw another line and Rototool will add it. If you get something you didn’t want, holding down the Option key turns the green cursor red, and just draw over the wrong part and it’ll be removed.

I cannot express to you how amazing the Rototool is. Just the week before I got CS5, I had to mask out seven bodies falling out of frame after being shot by a firing squad. I must have spent an hour and a half drawing individual masks, then keyframing and moving them. With the rototool I did the same work in twenty minutes, in no small part due to the fact that Rototool also attempts to keyframe the motion of the object automatically. It didn’t always work (and at some points would select the whole frame), but when it did it was a God-send.

Now, naturally the Rototool requires some tweaking, but nothing along the lines of frustration and fussy detail I had working with a standard mask.

Behind the scenes, CS5 has some improvements as well. Rendering out to video went much faster; I opened several projects in both CS4 and CS5 and rendering was about 60% faster when rendering the same project. As an aside, using the Rototool took a lot longer to render out: using hand-drawn masks took 37 seconds to output to video, while the Rototool version took 4 1/2 minutes! But if it’s a choice between an hour’s worth of work moving masks by hand and letting the computer render for longer, I’ll take the latter.

Adobe also claims multicore/mulitiprocessor support has been greatly improved, but I’m afraid my no-longer-latest-and-greatest Macbook Pro with 2GB of RAM couldn’t take advantage of it; turning MP support on greatly slowed the normal rendering (which I was already happy with).

Adobe has introduced several other new features like Mocha (a “stand-alone planar tracking application” which makes isolating and tracking elements easier) and Auto-keyframing (which automatically tracks changes you make in your video).

The more deeply I look into After Effects, the more I’m shocked by what it’s capable of, and the more I notice its results in professional TV and Video. The work Adobe is doing here is simply astonishing: they’re making After Effects easier and faster without taking away any of the power.

Appletell Rating:

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