I've been doing video production work at various levels for about 10 years, and use a video editing package that does both a good job of editing, but also has numerous features integrated that allow you to do motion graphics, including 3D motion graphics. I've certainly heard of After Effects, but had never used it. And given the power of the NLE that I use, I'd wondered if there was a need for it.
When Church Production Magazine asked if I'd be interested in reviewing After Effect that comes with Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5, I welcomed the opportunity to see why so many video editing job requirements include After Effects experience. So, let's begin with what After Effects can do for you.
WHAT CAN'T IT DO?
After Effects can be viewed as a special effects system for video editing. You can do your typical motion graphics work, causing still images or even footage clips to move around the screen in interesting ways (which many editing applications can do), but they go further by making it easy to have the objects seem to obey the laws of physics. You can add effects such as shadows, glows, blurs, and many, many others to clips. You can generate electrical storms, Star Wars-like Light Saber effects, and even have objects shatter and crumble off the screen. You can use After Effects' particle effects to generate dust storms, blizzards, and many other cool visual effects. You can take your green-screen footage and use one of the several impressive chroma-keying plug-ins to key out the backdrop color and composite the result on top of other footage. You can use its motion-tracking capabilities to overlay part of one image with another image—perhaps replacing a road sign in a highway video clip with one of your own making. Or simply stabilize some shaky footage.
The name “After Effects” generated some confusion for me in the past. To me, the name implies that After Effects is something you apply to your finished video-editing project (the “After” part of the name). But in fact, you'd use After Effects to build up typically short clips that you then would pull into your video editor as part of your larger project—much like you'd use Photoshop to create a nicely treated image for use in a magazine layout.
The best way to understand what After Effects can do is to look at some examples. The website www.videocopilot.net has numerous tutorials available that show off the power of After Effects, and teach you how to create those effects, as well. Click on the Tutorials button near the top of the page, and then hover your mouse over the image of a tutorial to see the end result play.
After Effects is extraordinarily powerful—and that comes with a pretty steep learning curve. As part of learning After Effects for this review, I picked up the book “Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects: Essential and Advanced Techniques” by Chris and Trish Meyer. It is an excellent resource, walking you through the After Effects functionality in a logical and thorough manner.
While After Effects does have a steep learning curve, it wasn't as hard to learn as I thought it would be. Its functionality and interface is logical, although there are some functions that if you don't know the keyboard shortcut, you can't use it.
Another way of looking at After Effects is as a merger of a video editing program with Photoshop. Footage and other graphic elements are placed on a timeline as in video editing, but like in Photoshop, only one element can be placed on a layer—you can't butt two clips up against each other in one layer.
Effects are then applied to the layer, modifying the clip or graphic on that track. Numerous effects can be applied to a layer, and the order of application can be rearranged as you desire.
After Effects also includes 3D options—being able to place 2D elements in 3D space, adding lighting and cameras, to achieve an almost 3D effect. By almost, I mean that you can't generate a 3D text object that has depth, but you can place 2D text in a 3D space to get depth effects. Cameras can be placed in this model, and flown through the objects. 3D layers can be told to always orient themselves toward the camera, so that they never end up looking like paper cut-outs.
APROPOS APPLICATION
I used After Effects to do my Green Screen keying for a project where my video editor's stock green-screen effect wasn't doing a good enough job. Whereas in my video editor, I struggled for a while to get the green out without losing parts of my actress, the Keylight plug-in in After Effects only took a few seconds of tweaking to get spectacular keying results.
I generated a fun intro using After Effects for an Operation Christmas Child promo for my church, using the Particle World and Write On effect. With Write On, the words Operation Christmas Child appear as if being hand-written on the screen, and then the text dissolved into stars flowing off the screen to the left. (This can be viewed at www.churchproduction.com /christmaschild.)
After Effects is also incredibly stable—I had no technical difficulties with the program itself. The only issue I ran into was a complication of using Mocha, the third-party motion tracking application that ships with After Effects. Mocha itself worked fine, but I had difficulty transferring tracking data from Mocha into my After Effects project. I was trying to overlay a photo onto a picture frame in a video clip, and when I pasted the tracking information from Mocha into the After Effects track for my picture, the picture seemed to go away. However, Imagineer Systems (the maker of Mocha) explained that if you have two layers of unequal dimensions (like I had), the tracking information doesn't transfer completely accurately. I needed to create a pre-composition of my inset photo, apply the tracking data from Mocha to that pre-composition, and then adjust the anchor point for that layer. It worked fine when handled in this fashion.
If you use Adobe Premiere as your video editing application, you can bring After Effects compositions into your Premiere timeline without having to render out footage from After Effects first—this is a great time-saver and convenience. With other editors, you'll need to render out the video from After Effects to be able to pull it into your editing project.
My bottom line? I'm kicking myself for not having learned After Effects years ago. It's an amazing tool, and takes your production level up to a whole new level. It's mind-boggling what you can do with this application.
