Adobe After Effects is a well respected video editing and postwork program. It is used by television and film makers to add any number of special effects to their footage. The CS3 version introduced a number of new features and upgrades that make it an even more effective program. Many of the upgrades to the program involve the way the program works with other programs when importing or exporting, while others are entirely new.
- It has always been possible to import files from Photoshop (another Adobe product) into After Effects, but some features were not fully imported in such a way that they were still editable. One of these features is Photoshop layer styles. But with the release of version CS3 the style layer properties of Photoshop files became not only “editable,” but “animatable.”
- An entirely new feature that was first introduced in After Effects CS3 is the Puppet function. This upgrade provides a group of tools that allow the user to take part of an image, such as a person or an animal, and define a mesh for it that can then be posed almost like a 3D animated figure. This permits users to animate virtually any 2D image.
- Another interesting and useful upgrade in CS3 is the Brainstorm feature. Brainstorm lets the user experiment with different variations on a property. In the dialog he can compare the results of different settings for that property and use the version he prefers. Or he can choose to change different or multiple combinations of properties and compare these changes before applying them.
- After Effects CS3 has also upgraded the already extensive export functions available to the user. In particular, is has added new presets export option that allow users to quickly and easily export their video in a format that will play well on small web devices like phones and the Apple iPod
. - Adobe has upgraded the color management tools in CS3. The new simpler color control interface makes it much easier to control the color of particular items in the video, as well as the resulting output colors.