After Effects at a Glance

Loaded with powerful new features, Adobe After Effects 6.5 helps motion graphic designers, compositors, and visual effects artists produce content for film, video, DVD, or the Web. With superior performance and tools that enable you to be visually innovative, meet production challenges, and deliver the quality results your clients expect, Adobe After Effects 6.5 enables you to:

Work Faster, Work Smarter – After Effects 6.5 introduces new intelligent disk caching that extends the power of RAM previews so you spend less time re-rendering as you make changes. Expanded integration with Adobe Photoshop ® CS and other products in the Adobe Video Collection offers new workflow flexibility. OpenGL support has been expanded, and comprehensive scripting capabilities have been added.

Be Visually Innovative – Use the new Animation Presets palette to save your favorite animation settings for instant reuse in any composition, and use any of the more than 250 professionally designed text Animation Presets to create sophisticated animations simply by dragging and dropping a preset onto a text layer. You’ll also find more than 60 new effects, including Particle World and Light Sweep.

Meet Production Challenges – Advanced cloning features in After Effects 6.5 make retouching footage easier than ever. New high-quality grain management tools can help make video look more like film (Professional edition only), and new automatic color correction tools allow you to instantly make a range of corrections. Motion tracking enhancements (Professional edition only), AAF and OMF file format support (Professional edition only), and MPEG-2 file export (Windows only) deliver new workflow flexibility.

Disk Caching – An innovative new disk caching system in After Effects 6.5 works in tandem with RAM previewing to improve real-time playback and previews. After Effects 6.5 can now save rendered frames on disk as well as in memory, so you spend less time re-rendering as you make changes and preview your project. Both RAM and disk caching work on a per layer basis, so if you change one layer in a multiple layer composition, After Effects 6.5 maintains the caches for unmodified layers, reducing rendering time.

Integration with Leading Adobe Tools – After Effects 6.5 offers improved integration to make it easier than ever to work with Adobe Photoshop CS, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Adobe EncoreTM DVD. Text from Photoshop CS files-including text on a path-is fully editable, and Photoshop CS files saved with 16-bit color can be imported into After Effects with layers intact. When importing Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 projects, you can now choose specific sequences to import, and you can drag and drop or copy and paste content between After Effects 6.5 and Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5. Directly import and enhance Adobe Encore DVD menus, and use After Effects 6.5 to transform groups of layers into buttons.

Expanded OpenGL Support – In After Effects 6.5, using OpenGL is even faster and more precise. For example, ambient, specular, and diffuse lighting settings now honor the metal setting for OpenGL previews, cone lights render as they would using software only, you can use OpenGL when performing RAM previews, and you can create draft-quality movies quickly by using the OpenGL Hardware renderer.

Comprehensive scripting support (Professional edition only) – New scripting support enables you to customize After Effects 6.5 to fit your production environment. Using scripting, you can create automated commands, make global changes to layers, and speed up repetitive tasks.To show you the ease and power of scripting, After Effects 6.5 includes several sample scripts, including one for replacing text in text layers. tools, then upgrade to After Effects 6.5 Professional later.

Macintosh G5 and Intel Processor Enhancements – Benefit from faster performance when you take advantage of new support for the latest Macintosh G5 and Intel processors.

Animation Presets – Save effects, transformations, masks, expressions, and text as animation presets in the new Effects & Presets palette so you can quickly apply the same animation parameters to other elements.

Text Animation Presets and Text Enhancements – Apply any of the more than 250 new text animation presets in After Effects 6.5 to quickly experiment with a wide variety of text animation options. If a preset isn’t quite right for your project, you can easily modify its keyframes and other parameters. Other enhancements to text animation in After Effects 6.5 include the ability to set blend modes between characters, to randomize the order in which the range selector affects text in an animation, to automatically create animated masks from text animations, and more.

Over 60 New Effects – After Effects 6.5 includes more than 60 new effects, including effects licensed from Cycore, the original developers of Final Effects. Add smoke and sparks to your compositions using Particle World, blazing ray-of-light transitions using Light Burst and Light Sweep, or change all the colors in an image to just three hues using Toner. Also, the Professional edition of After Effects 6.5 now includes more than 30 additional 16-bit effects.

Paint and Clone Tool Enhancements – New vector paint and cloning features in After Effects 6.5 further enhance your ability to handle the most challenging production tasks. The Advanced Clone Tool in After Effects 6.5 now includes a visual overlay of the clone source, so you can see both the source and target simultaneously. Because the source is slightly transparent, you can see exactly what you are about to clone. The Clone tool now has five different user-definable clone presets that are invaluable when you have specific tasks that you need to perform repeatedly over the course of a project. Eraser tools have been enhanced as well-choose to Erase everything on the layer, only paint, or only the last paint stroke.

New Color Correction and Grain Management Tools – Nearly every production faces the challenge of trying to match footage from various sources. After Effects 6.5 includes several new tools that can help make footage blend together seamlessly. After Effects 6.5 Professional includes new Add Grain, Match Grain, and Remove Grain effects that can be used to make video footage look more like film or to minimize the grain differences between various film stocks (Professional edition only). After Effects 6.5 also now includes Color Finesse from Synthetic Aperture, a professional color processing system that uses a 32-bit floating-point color space for precise adjustments. After Effects 6.5 speeds the color correction process even further with the new Shadow/Highlight, Auto Color, Auto Levels, and Auto Contrast effects.

Firewire Previews – Preview your compositions on NTSC and PAL video monitors on either a Windows or Mac OS X system, using just a Firewire port or video capture device with a Firewire output.

Motion Tracking Enhancements (Professional edition only) – In After Effects 6.5, motion tracking has been refined for even greater accuracy. You can now track the scale of an object, or limit your tracking to just the horizontal or vertical movement of a scene. View and edit tracker paths to correct problem areas. Use new confidence actions to minimize manual re-tracking. And a handy magnification window now pops up when placing track points to help you easily find the best features to track.

Professional File Format Support – Import AAF (Advanced Authoring Format) files to exchange timeline, edit, keyframe, and other data with AAF savvy applications such as Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 and other editing systems such as those developed by Avid (Professional edition only). Import or export OMF (Open Media Framework) files to work with Avid’s non-linear editing systems (Professional edition only). Render directly to MPEG-2 files for integration with DVD projects (Windows only).

Additional Enhancements – After Effects 6.5 also offers dozens of other enhancements that make your work more intuitive. Choose colors using HSB or RGB values as well as web-specific hexadecimal values and 16-bit color values with the Adobe Color Picker. Precisely position temporary elements using the new Guide Layer feature. Adjust the tension on RotoBézier masks by dragging on the vertices using the Convert Vertex tool. Plus, control the brightness or darkness of the After Effects user interface and much more.