Adobe After Effects CS4
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Publisher: Adobe, Inc. Review Date: March 1, 2009 Reprinted with permission from MicroFilmmaker Magazine Final Score: 10/10 |
After Effects CS4 is a lesson in technology convergence.
In the last few years we have seen huge changes in communications technology. The traditional separations between telephone, cable TV, networking, computing, and cell phones is blurring.
Only a few years ago, the distribution options available to filmmakers were: (1) DVD, (2) Broadcast TV, or (3) Film output. Today your film could play on any of a dozen video hosting sites (like YouTube), it could be available as a DVD download from CreateSpace.com, it can be output in MP4 format to load onto an iPod, burned to DVD or Blu-Ray, or play in streaming Flash from a website. Did you know that videos can even be embedded in PDF documents today?
Adobe has wisely realized that, as the technologies converge, the video producer is increasingly challenged to provide excellent quality video across a variety of media and devices. Continuing the "Bridge" strategy, Adobe is increasingly integrating its separate applications into a coordinated suite capable of reaching all media. The concept is that, if you know the required outputs, you should be able to develop your content in a way that ensures you will be able to reach those outputs without compromising quality.
Most microfilmmakers will relate to this issue from the 16:9 HD versus 4:3 SD drill. If you develop your project in 4:3, you'll sacrifice the quality if you need to href="convert the result to 16:9. If you develop in 16:9, then the quality will be compromised if you later need to crop or letterbox to get to 4:3. You can't develop for both. The tools haven't supported it. You have to choose one format and then convert the final result to the other format. But in CS4, Adobe is doing everything possible to ensure that you can develop for multiple formats at the same time without sacrificing output quality.
You can see this thoughtfulness in design in one of the simplest new features of After Effects CS4, the 4:3 Center-cut Safe Area. (Figure 1)
Figure 1. 4:3 Center-cut Safe Area.
This simple overlay has always provided the outer rectangle – the Action Safe area, and the inner rectangle – the Title Safe Area. But in CS4, you can see that additional vertical lines have been added to create a center 4:3 Safe Area.
As you are working you can check the framing of the scene for both 16:9 and 4:3 formats. It's no longer an afterthought. This kind of attention to detail is evident throughout the CS4 release.
The main improvement in After Effects CS4 is a workflow overhaul. There are several changes in the interface and in how After Effects works internally as well as how After Effects integrates with other Adobe products. These changes make After Effects easier to use and improve the workflow for sophisticated applications. There are also a slew of other new features, including some impressive new effects and capabilities.
Interoperation: AE CS4 and other CS4 Applications
CS stands for "Creative Suite". And Adobe is making it easier to buy a suite of programs rather than the individual programs. People who buy After Effects often buy Photoshop or Illustrator or both to use with After Effects. A lot of us upgrade one product at a time, over a period of months, because of the expense. But in CS4, Adobe is pitching very strongly that in this emerging multimedia world, a video producer needs all the tools to move in any output direction. And for that reason, we should buy a package solution rather than the individual programs. And they may be right.
Adobe has structured the CS4 suite so that there are additional features available when you buy the suite and install all the programs together. Some of these features cannot be added later. If you buy the programs separately and install them separately, some of the interoperation features simply won't be there. The package means something.
As far as I can tell, this is a technological requirement and not a marketing gimmick. There are some interoperation functions that have dependencies on the partnering applications all being present and all being at the same release level in order to work together.
Let's take a look at the CS4 interoperation features. Because understanding them will help you decide if it's time for an After Effects CS4 upgrade, or whether it's time to move to CS4 as a suite. (Click here to read Jeremy Hanke's full review of the CS4: Production Premium package.)
Adobe Dynamic Link
The idea behind Dynamic Link is that an object can be edited in one program and used in another program at the same time. When the editing program saves its changes, the update is propagated to the using program so that the changes are immediately reflected. The important point here is that it eliminates the need to render out an intermediate file from After Effects.
Let's compare the rendering workflow with the Dynamic Link workflow.
Imagine you have a composition in After Effects and you want to include that scene in a Premiere Pro sequence (Figure 2). The old way (before After Effects 7) would be to render out the composition to a file that could be imported into Premiere, usually an AVI or MOV file. It takes time to render the file. Then you have to import that file into Premiere and place it on the timeline. If you want to "tweak" something in the original composition, you have to return to the original project in After Effects, make the change, render the new file, import the new file into Premiere, and replace the old file on the timeline.
With Dynamic Link (which was introduced with Adobe AE 7/PPro 2 release), instead of rendering out a file, you simply save the project. Then in Premiere Pro you open the After Effects project file using "Import After Effects Composition…" and select the composition you want to import. Premiere Pro understands After Effects project files. This composition is now dynamically linked. If you make a change in the original composition in After Effects, it shows up on your timeline in Premiere Pro. No rendering. No file replacing. It's much easier. It's much faster. And you don't have to worry about possibly rendering out in the wrong mode and creating quality issues.
FIGURE 2: Adobe Dynamic Link of After Effects CS4 compositions into Premier Pro sequences.
FIGURE 3: Dynamic Link a blank After Effects composition from within Premiere Pro.
When I first played around with a previous version of Premiere Pro, which offered the "New After Effects Composition…" function (The CS4 version of which is shown in Figure 3), I remember being confused.
When I had clicked this, I 'expected that the sequence I was working on or the MOV file I had selected in Premiere Pro would magically show up in After Effects as a new composition. But this is not how it worked. Instead, it opened up a new completely empty black-background composition in AE. However, the new comp was already linked between Premiere Pro and After Effects. And any change that I made to the empty comp in AE showed up in Premiere Pro.
The completely empty comp was confusing at first. And then I realized it was a design choice that Adobe had made to deal with a technical problem called "round-tripping". If it were possible to dynamically link a Premiere Pro sequence in After Effects, and also to dynamically link an After Effects composition in Premiere Pro, then you could end up with some very weird cross-application recursive nesting of comps and sequences. Round-tripping issues commonly show up as scaling problems in dynamically linked software. Months after a product is released, when the biggest power users are on a critical deadline, the system grinds to a halt. And there is usually no recourse, because the system will have reached its limit for recursion.
Well the wizards at Adobe have somehow found a way to overcome the past limitations with Dynamic Link, by now allowing the Link to essentially move both directions in CS4. As seen in Figure 3B and 3C, you can edit an entire sequence in Premiere Pro, select all the pieces, and then choose to "Replace with After Effects" composition. Voila. All the edits you've made are moved to After Effects and there's a single line of "video" in your Premiere Pro timeline which links to the new AE composition. (Now, one limitation that does arise with this is that you're now restricted to doing any additional edtis in After Effects once you do this, specifically to prevent the round-tripping issues I mentioned in the last paragraph. However, this isn't much of a limitation if you wait to go to AE with your edit until you want to add final compositing, special effects, and color grading.)
FIGURE 3B: The new CS4 Dynamic Link allows you to select multiple edit lines in Premiere Pro, Dynamic Link it into After Effects, and the multiple edit lines are now replaced with a single After Effects composition.
FIGURE 3C: In After Effects CS4, all the edit information from the new reverse Dynamic Link is available. You're all set up for final compositing or color grading.
Adobe Dynamic Link is also available between After Effects CS4 and Encore CS4, which is very useful.
The XFL File Format
If you work in Flash Professional and work in After Effects, you know what a pain it is to have to reproduce a video in an interactive interface for a website. The client likes the AE comp and says something like "I want it just like that, except that in the middle it should stop and give them a question and three buttons to click." And now your plan to render the video and incorporate it into Flash is toast. You have to assemble all the pieces of the AE comp inside Flash and recreate everything you did in AE.
The XFL file format in CS4 helps address that problem (Figure 4). When you export a composition as XFL, After Effects will render out whatever video needs to be rendered, but then it also carries along the layers of the comp into the XFL file. When you open the XFL project in Flash it has all the layers and assets ready to build the interactive bits.
FIGURE 4. The XFL File Format used between After Effects CS4 and Flash Pro CS4.
XMP Metadata
Metadata is information about objects that is carried along with them throughout a workflow. By analogy, I sometimes think of it like a dossier that is carried with a person throughout his or her career. It explains what they did, where they've been, and sums up what is known about them. In a simple production workflow we often carry these details around in our heads or on a combination of notebook paper, spreadsheets, and sticky notes. "Oh yeah, this is that clip I shot in June using the HVX camera. I think I shot it at 24p in 1080 mode."In a complex workflow, the details can rapidly become overwhelming. Many production houses keep this kind of information in a separate database application. XMP Metadata allows that information to travel with the asset through the workflow, where it is easy to access and update, instead of being maintained separately.
Premiere Pro CS4 and Soundbooth CS4 have the ability to work with a new CS4 component called Adobe Media Encoder. And one of the things it can do is perform speech recognition and generate a transcript from a clip (Figure 5).
FIGURE 5: Premiere Pro CS4 generating Speech Metadata.
This isn't an ordinary transcript, it's speech metadata. That means the time code where each word was found is saved. And that means you can search a video clip for a particular word and move to that point on the timeline. Speech search is pretty much the "Holy Grail" of video indexing. The speech metadata is stored in the Premiere Pro project file. After Effects is able to import and use this metadata as "markers" in After Effects, so that you can time your animation to events in the audio transcript.
Now, back to the whole suite idea, in Premiere Pro, you can actually search transcription metadata, click on a word, and the playhead will automatically go there. I think you can easily imagine the value of this feature. Someone tells you "add the explosion to the scene immediately after the main character says 'pickles'". And you just type in 'pickles' and the playback head is magically repositioned to that moment in time. How cool is that?
I didn't test speech search extensively, as it's not a component of After Effects, which this review is designed to focus on. Generating the speech metadata is supposed to take only about as long as it takes to play the clip. The clip I selected was about 3 minutes and it took Premiere Pro about 15 minutes to generate the metadata. I suspect that I just chose a clip with poor sound quality, and should have performed some sound engineering before attempting to transcribe it.
Again, After Effects CS4 will make use of this data if it is present, but it does not generate speech metadata itself. That's one more reason to consider a Creative Suite package.