After Effects 5.0
The essential tool for motion graphics and visual effects.
Adobe® After Effects® 5.0 software continues to set motion graphics and visual effects standards for professional cross-media delivery using a toolset that lets you explore unlimited creative possibilities with precise control. After Effects not only offers unparalleled integration with Adobe Premiere, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator, but it efficiently produces professional results too. So, whether you're creating for film, video, multimedia, or the Web, After Effects 5.0 delivers a comprehensive set of tools for a flexible workflow that meets your many 2D and 3D compositing, animation, and effects needs.
Adobe® After Effects® 5.0 is a powerful upgrade to the award-winning motion graphics and visual effects software. Its versatile and powerful new features enable a flexible workflow tailored to your needs.
Precise control
Superior Adobe product integration — Photoshop
Adobe® After Effects® 5.0 features the award-winning Adobe user interface, familiar to anyone who uses Adobe Photoshop®, Adobe Illustrator®, or Adobe Premiere®. The tabbed windows — along with Adobe's popular tabbed palettes, similar tools, and common keyboard shortcuts — make it possible to work more efficiently and move among the programs with ease. After Effects, Premiere, and Adobe LiveMotion™ use a similar time-based interface, so moving among the applications is a snap. Productivity-boosting features such the pen tool, Align palette, rulers and guides, editing tools, and free transform mode work in After Effects just as they do in other popular Adobe products.
You can transform layered Photoshop images into animations with complete ease. Import Photoshop files as compositions one at a time or in batches. After Effects preserves layers, common layer effects, adjustment layers, alpha channels, transfer modes, vector masks, and more. You can then apply visual effects to color-correct, stylize, or manipulate each layer, and animate these layers over time. Use Photoshop paths as mask or motion points. Move easily between Photoshop and After Effects to complete your work.
After Effects 5.0 expands your creative control with dozens of new features:
• Composite layers in 2D or 3D space with fine control over multiple cameras and lights.
• Animate layers hierarchically by defining a parent-child relationship between any two layers.
• Use nondestructive vector paint tools to reveal an image over time, draw animated cartoons, and much more (Production Bundle only).
• Use expressions to define relationships between parameters so that you can create procedural-type animations without using keyframes.
• Apply exciting new effects such as Shatter, Radio Waves, and Vegas to create a new range of looks.
• Take advantage of masking enhancements. Edit masks in the Composition window, assign mask colors, apply Motion Blur to masks, and much more.
Enhanced productivity
Smart performance enhancements mean that creating and refining your work is faster than ever. Dozens of interface enhancements introduce significant improvements that provide a more efficient and streamlined workflow. Improved RAM Previews, dynamic previews, and intelligent caching make previewing footage files faster and more efficient. Plus, Adobe® After Effects® 5.0 delivers tighter integration with Adobe Photoshop®, Adobe Illustrator®, and Adobe Premiere®.
After Effects preserves 16-bit color depth and vector masks in imported Photoshop images, and it preserves transparency settings and transfer modes in imported Illustrator files. In addition, when you import an After Effects movie in Premiere 6.0, you can now use the Edit Original command in Premiere to open the original After Effects project.
Versatile output options
Adobe® After Effects® 5.0 delivers the most versatile motion graphics and visual effects toolkit available today, so you can produce high-quality output for film, video, multimedia, and the Web. New 16-bit-per-channel color support ensures the finest quality for film and HDTV, while support for Macromedia® Flash™ (SWF) export means that your work can play on the hottest Web sites. Both QuickTime™ and MP3 audio compression codecs are now supported, so the files you create are even quicker to download on the Web.
Production Bundle — Effects Pack
To meet the needs of different audiences, Adobe® After Effects® 5.0 is available in two versions — the Standard version and the Production Bundle version. The Standard version provides the core 2D/3D compositing, animation, and effects tools that motion graphics professionals, Web designers, and video professionals need. The Production Bundle version is ideal for visual effects artists and motion graphics professionals who need all the tools of the Standard version plus additional keying, motion control, and distortion tools, audio effects, 3D channel effects, 16-bit-per-channel colour, vector paint, and support for network rendering.
The Effects Pack in After Effects offers a variety of exciting types of visual effects including Warping and Particle Playground. You can warp images over time using Bézier Warp, Mesh Warp, and Reshape effects; displace pixels from one layer to another using Displacement Map; or apply the Glow effect to create a diffuse halo along an object's edge. With Particle Playground, you can animate a large number of objects (dots, images, or text) so that they move independently and yet produce consistent group behaviour. Use Fractal Noise to create textures and objects that cannot be described using simple geometric shapes. Other effects include Corner Pin, Lightning, Scatter, Ripple, Bulge, Wave Warp, Optics Compensation, and Twirl.
Keying Pack
The Keying Pack in Adobe® After Effects® 5.0 delivers sophisticated keying controls for producing precise composites. The Linear Color Key uses the RGB, hue, or chroma information you specify to create transparency from a key color. With the Color Difference key, you can produce combination mattes to control hard-to-key images such as smoke, shadows, or glass. The Spill Suppressor makes it easy to remove key-color traces from light reflecting off a screen and onto your subject. Create clean mattes with the Simple Choker, or choke and spread the matte to create clean edges with the Matte Choker. The Inner/Outer Key effect makes it easy to extract an object from its background. And you can perform other specialized keying tasks with the Extract, Difference Matte, Color Range, and Alpha Levels keys.
Motion Pack
From reducing unwanted motion to creating natural-looking zoom effects, the After Effects Motion Pack delivers the tools you need to produce the highest-quality animations. Use the Motion Tracker to isolate a moving element on one layer and precisely track it to a moving element on another layer. The Motion Stabilizer tracks a single element on a layer to stabilize unwanted motion. With the Wiggler, you can simulate more realistic motion by adding random changes to any property over time.
Automate the creation of motion and effects by writing custom scripts with the Motion Math tool—or run the Motion Math scripts included with After Effects. You can even simulate the accelerating effect of a zoom lens using the Exponential Scale tool, which converts linear scaling of a layer to exponential scaling.
Audio Pack
The Audio Pack in Adobe® After Effects® 5.0 expands the range of high-quality audio effects you can incorporate into a composition. Add depth and character to a sound with Flange, or make one voice or instrument sound like many with Chorus. Apply Parametric EQ to isolate and fine-tune specific ranges of sound. With Reverb, simulate a spacious, acoustically live interior. Create simple tonal sounds (such as a doorbell) by applying Tone, or use Modulator to precisely control audio delay and modulation, creating echo and chorus effects. You can also enhance sounds by removing high and low frequencies with the High-Low Pass filter.
3D Channel Pack:
Use the 3D Channel Pack to create effects with the auxiliary channel information stored in imported 3D files, including RLA, Softimage PIC/ZPIC, and ElectricImage EI/EIZ files. Use the Depth Matte effect to read the z-depth information in a 3D file, and then slice the image along the z-axis to insert other objects. The Depth of Field Blur effect simulates a camera that focuses on one area in a 3D scene while allowing other areas to blur. The ID Matte isolates objects in a 3D scene for editing. The 3D Fog effect applies a fog effect along the z-axis, so that distant parts of a 3D scene look hazier or even disappear. The 3D Channel Extract effect makes auxiliary channels visible as either grayscale or multichannel color images, which you can use as image maps or in other specialized effects.
Render Engine
Take advantage of network rendering in Adobe® After Effects® 5.0 using the Render Engine, which includes an unlimited license. Install multiple copies to streamline your rendering process. Each Render Engine can monitor a Watch folder on a network. If you use the Collect Files command to copy projects (and their associated footage) to this Watch folder, each Render Engine starts rendering those projects as soon as they appear. You can monitor the progress using a standard Web browser.
16-bit-per-channel color
Deep color support means that you get higher-quality output. Adobe® After Effects® 5.0 can work in 16-bit-per-channel mode, making a larger range of colors available. And when you work with high-resolution images that use a narrow range of colors, such as when you're creating film effects or output for HDTV, the difference is easily visible: Transitions between colors are smoother with less visible banding, and more detail is preserved.
You can choose whether to work in 8-bit-per-channel or 16-bit-per-channel color mode for each project. You can directly import 16-bit images, including those from Adobe Photoshop®, and you can composite and color-correct footage in 16-bit mode; the Info palette displays 16-bit color values with exact precision. To optimize performance, quickly rough out a composition in 8-bit color mode, and then finalize and output 16-bit files for maximum quality.
Vector paint tools
The nondestructive vector paint tools in Adobe® After Effects® 5.0 open up a host of new creative possibilities, from strokes that reveal an image over time to animated cartoons and painted textures that change from frame to frame. Use brush controls to specify exactly how the strokes you paint will look. Characteristics such as brush radius, color, and opacity can be modified to get the exact desired look. Use the Onion Skin mode to paint strokes frame by frame. Take advantage of numerous options to control how the paint strokes interact with the layer they appear on. For more control over the final results, you can also choose whether strokes continuously paint or are recorded to the current frame, to sequential frames, or in real time. You'll quickly discover how indispensable these versatile tools are.
