NEWS • FEBRUARY 26, 2001
After Effects 5 Goes 3D
[Page 2 of 4]

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.

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