Adobe After Effects has a huge user base in the motion graphics and animation sectors, and Adobe After Effects CS6 enables you to deliver more cinematic visual effects and sophisticated motion graphics than ever before!
Adobe After Effects has a huge user base in the motion graphics and
animation sectors, so any update to the power of this venerable
compositing workhorse will be eagerly scrutinised by those working in
broadcast and cross-media applications. Luckily for those artists (and
Adobe), After Effects CS6 will do nothing to tarnish its status and
appeal.
Global Performance boost in After Effects
Adobe After Effects CS6 users demand a lot from the application in
terms of performance and file handling. As some compositions have
hundreds of individual layers for example, each which can be nested
within others, testing, especially on lower-specified computers, can
cause performance bottlenecks and even application crashes. Enter the
grandly titled 'Global Performance Cache' in AE CS6 - a combination of a
global RAM cache, a persistent disk cache, and a new graphics pipeline.
Chug no more
Working with animation and effects has traditionally meant loading a
project, then waiting as it chugs through rendering frames into a cache
during its first run through, before allowing you to preview the
composition or a selected work-area of the project. Now however you are
able to open and cache one project while you work on another composition
entirely via a new command in the Composition menu, called
unsurprisingly enough, Cache Work Area in Background. Joking aside it's a
joy to behold, or not as the case may be, as you can just fire up the
command and get to work elsewhere, then switch back to start work on the
original when required.
If you want a project to run in real-time (or as it will be output)
After Effects has always required you to load it into RAM using the RAM
Preview facility. The first time this is run, it displays a green line
running as normal along the top of the Timeline panel in the lower
portion of the application window, indicating which frames have been
cached into RAM. However where things get interesting in CS6 is when you
make changes.
Hands on with Adobe After Effects CS6
We decided to add an effect to our comp, CC Mr Smoothie from the
Stylize menu, and as is normal, the green line disappears as the cached
composition has now been changed. However the next RAM Preview that's
run is considerably faster than the previous preview, despite the
change. If we then delete the effect, the green line reappears and again
the preview runs in real-time, without reloading the RAM Preview. The
same thing happens if you toggle layer visibility as well as after an
undo or redo command. Adobe has re-engineered the system to recognise
any frame of a composition or layer inside a project that is the same as
a previously rendered and cached frame, so that it does not need to be
re-rendered. Reusable frames are recognised anywhere on the timeline,
and this includes when they're in duplicated layers, or duplicated
compositions or not on adjacent frames - which includes using loop
expressions, time remapping and copying then pasting keyframes.
Persistence of Caching
Another great enhancement in After Effects CS6 is when you close the
project or exit the app. On reopening a previously cached project we
found blue lines above the comp layers, indicating that the application
has located all the previously cached frames on the disk, without the
need to re-render them. This persistent disk cache function can thus
save a lot of time, and becomes even more valuable when the power goes
down or your system crashes. The disk cache can be defined in
Preferences> Media & Disk Cache, so you can specify a fast,
connected drive, one separate from your footage. As an added bonus, the
cache contains frames from all projects you have opened in the same or
earlier sessions; so disk-cached frames from one project can be
retrieved again for other projects that require those same frames.
Open GL now takes more control of many of the drawing features in
After Effects CS6, including user interface elements, such as masks,
motion paths and layer bounding box handles as well as Action and Title
Safe grid overlays.
Throwing shapes in After Effects CS6
There's closer integration with Illustrator- allowing you to create
Shapes from vector layers with a dedicated command. Once in this form
it's simple to adjust attributes such as stroke widths and colours and
fills, editing the colour directly within After Effects rather than
returning to Illustrator. You can transform the scale, position, and
rotation of the layer and edit the shape using Bezier handles. Other
vector shapes can be added and blended with the original. Then, because
this is After Effects, operators can be added to apply transformational
animation to the stroke lines. We applied a number of animating paths to
a number of imported stars simply by clicking on the outline of each
star, adjusting the stroke width and clicking on the Add arrow alongside
the Fill and Stroke controls, then choosing the Wiggle Paths operator.
Massive 3D improvements in Adobe After Effects CS6
Perhaps the most exciting feature of the new release is the new
Ray-traced 3D rendering engine, allowing you to simply and quickly
design fully ray-traced, geometric text and shape layers in 3D space.
After Effects had access to 3D before this release, but the new
ray-traced renderer is offered as a new more physically accurate and
powerful alternative to the existing scanline-based composition
renderer, now known as the Classic Renderer. Once selected in the
Composition Settings dialog, the Ray-traced 3D renderer allows for some
enhanced 3D capabilities. These include bevelled and extruded text and
shape layers for adding depth to those graphics you just brought in from
Illustrator for example. It can also allow bending of footage and
composition layers in order to add dimension and more advanced lighting
effects. There's support for environment maps, allowing you to use a
photo (HDR or otherwise) as a layer to enable the scene to have
photorealistic reflections of the virtual imagery. There are also new
material options like reflection, transparency - and index of
refraction, which simulates light travelling through glass and other
translucent materials.
Ray tracing
Using a ray tracer to render the scene results in improved soft
shadows and depth-of-field blur, plus sharper light transmission for
video projection and realistic effects such as light streaming through a
stained glass window. The quality of the render can also be adjusted -
but this has a knock on effect on render times. The ray tracer uses the
CPU of the computer for its calculations, but if you have a qualified
graphics card that supports NVIDIA OptiX, you can take advantage of
accelerated rendering- one of the Quadro line is recommended. However
the Classic Renderer is still adequate for applying many lighting styles
and material options.
Accurate Tracking in After Effects CS6
Another highly useful tool is the new 3D camera tracker. As the name
suggests, this builds a virtual 3D camera within a piece of imported
footage, automatically determining the movements of the camera in the
original footage and its relationship to the planes in the scene. It's
thus much quicker than previous versions to place new 3D layers in your
scene more faithfully in your scene. They'll probably need tidying up
with the Roto Brush though. The latest versions of Autodesk 3ds max and
Cinema 4D from Maxon offer workflows that dovetail particularly nicely
with data from this new tracker, allowing complex 3D scenes to be
composited into tracked footage in After Effects. If you're a fan of the
2.5D planar tracking and rotoscoping tool mocha AE from Imagineer
Systems, don't worry, it continues to be bundled with After Effects
albeit in a more integrated form.
Feathered friend
As in Photoshop, Adobe After Effects CS6 lets you add a feathered
soft edge to masked shapes, but now the new Mask Feather tool lets you
define as many points as you want along a closed mask, and define the
width of the feather at each of these points. Alt-clicking the feather
point allows you to drag it to alter the tension of the feather outline,
while right-clicking it lets you adjust Radius and Corner Angles for
each feather point. Variable mask feather makes for better blending in
the composite, allowing some sections such as hard metallic edges to
remain sharp, while other sections that are out of focus or otherwise
blurred can have a softer outline.
Ditch artefacts in After Effects CS6
'Rolling shutter' artefacts, where lines are unnaturally skewed, have
become increasingly common in modern video editing. They're found in
hand-held footage shot with CMOS sensors in video-capable DSLRs, such as
the Canon MKII, but worse with mobile phone footage. To the rescue,
somewhat, comes the new Rolling Shutter Repair effect. When applied to
affected footage it will identify problem areas and let you adjust the
Rolling shutter rate to remove the skew.
Import abilities in After Effects CS6
It's also now easier to work with files from Avid Media Composer and
Symphony, or Apple's Final Cut Pro 7, editing applications. By using the
Pro Import After Effects utility acquired from Automatic Duck, you are
able to import all your media and clips from the external project at
once. Effects are translated and recreated - your editing timeline
becomes a composition in After Effects. Many effects and parameters from
the host application are carried across, such as position, scale,
rotation, keyframes, composite modes, titles and speed changes.
80 new effects to choose from
After Effects CS6 also ships with over 80 new and updated built-in
effects, including the HD version of the Cycore FX suite. All of these
now support 16-bit per channel colour, rather than the 8-bit versions of
before, and thus ideal for HD video projects. 35 of the Cycore effects
and many of the standard Adobe effects such as Drop Shadow and Timewarp
also now support 32-bit floating point for maximum dynamic range -
essential for compositing with footage such as ARRIRAW from ARRIFLEX
D-21 or ALEXA digital cameras- now supported in After Effects CS6.
Another benefit for the broadcast sector is wider support for Colour
Lookup Tables (LUTs) for grading purposes.
The need for speed
You'll need a fairly powerful machine to run After Effects CS6. 8GB
of RAM is recommended (though minimum is 4GB) and a 64-bit processor
(Intel CoreTM2 Duo or AMD Phenom II processor; or Multicore Intel
processor for Macs) and operating system (Windows 7 with Service Pack 1
(64 bit) or Mac OS X v10.6.8 or v10.7). An Adobe-certified GPU card is
also recommended for GPU-accelerated rendering.
Reference: http://www.creativebloq.com/video-editing/adobe-after-effects-cs6-review-1233281
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