Product Reviews

Modern video-editing applications are capable of some impressive visual tricks, but if you want to take your animated montages and special effects even further, a dedicated compositing program such as After Effects is essential. It's often used to create animated DVD menus and intro sequences, but is equally adept at photo-realistic video montages or abstract animations.

After Effects resembles Premiere Pro, but dispenses with workflow tools to take a project from start to finish in favour of special-effect tools, many of which are akin to Photoshop. You can draw across, erase and clone parts of a video clip, add mesh distortions and generate a wide variety of animated media from fractals to audio spectrum analysers. A 3D animation facility is also included, but it's not a true 3D modelling package because it works with 2D objects only.

Adobe has made great progress in integrating its applications. Premiere Pro projects and Photoshop PSD files can be imported into After Effects with full access to individual layers, timelines and assets, and After Effects animations can be imported into Premiere or Encore DVD with no need to render first. The new screen layout resembles that of Premiere Pro 2, with docked palettes, and the new Adobe Bridge serves as a common file browser and media-cataloguing tool.

OpenGL 2.0 support boosts preview performance, with advanced effects such as motion blur, certain blending modes and anti-aliasing now handled by the graphics processor. You'll need a modern graphics card to take advantage of all these features, though.

The most exciting new creative tool is the Graph Editor. Keyframes define effects settings for specific frames, but rather than the software automatically filling in the gaps between keyframes,

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the Graph Editor presents a graphical display with bezier curve handles to control the exact route between keyframes. Any number of parameters can be displayed simultaneously and edited in groups with marquee selection, resizing and skew controls. We can't imagine a more precise control system.

A new Timewarp effect is included in After Effects Professional (£1,009 inc VAT) and provides smooth slow motion by detecting pixel motion to create entirely new intervening frames. It works well for most footage, although it sometimes produced strange results. In a close-up of a talking head it got confused about which teeth were which and shuffled them around inside the speaker's mouth, which was an alarming sight. Still, for most purposes it's effective and there's a wealth of options for fine-tuning performance. Unlike the existing time-stretch tool, Timewarp is keyframable for vari-speed effects. Audio sync is lost, though, and applying the effect to a truncated clip shifts its in and out points, which can be a nuisance.

The Professional version also adds support for 16- or 32-bit-per-channel colour, which maintains subtleties of colour information when applying aggressive multiple colour processes. Motion tracking, stabilisation and the delightfully named Wiggler for adding random movement to objects are also reserved for the Pro version.

It's difficult to rate After Effects. The Pro version costs more than most PCs, but it's a phenomenally powerful program that's a delight to use and doesn't have much in the way of competition. Avid Liquid 7 is a general-purpose editor that costs around £370 inc VAT and has some impressive effects with bezier curve control and excellent preview performance, but its handling of text and high-resolution images isn't up to scratch. A more directly comparable alternative is Autodesk Combustion 4 (around £800), but we haven't had a chance to try this yet.

After Effects Pro is the version to go for, but at over £1,000 it's overpriced. However, Production Studio Premium, which costs £1,343 and bundles After Effects Pro with Premiere Pro, Photoshop CS2, Encore DVD 2, Audition 2 and Illustrator CS2 is considerably more attractive. Each of these programs is the best of its type, and the integration between them secures the suite's standing as the best video-production package for the PC.