NEWS • FEBRUARY 26, 2001
After Effects 5 Goes 3D
Exclusive After Effects 5 QuickTime demos and tutorials!

by David Nagel
Executive Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com

Adobe has finally 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.

We also had a chance to speak 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, and we aren't going tot cover them all. But 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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