The latest version of the industry standard for motion graphics, and visual effects offers significant new levels of productivity, precision, and control, allowing you to create unique, stand-out visuals that exceed expectations. Anyone involved in the production of motion graphics and visual effects will want this After Effects 7.0 upgrade in order to take advantage of powerful new features and many time-saving workflow enhancements.
After Effects Professional is also available as the motion graphics and visual effects component of Adobe
Production Studio Premium (Adobe After Effects Standard is included in Adobe Production Studio Standard;
both versions are Windows only) software, the unified post-production design environment that combines all of the Adobe post-production applications with the innovative workflow efficiency of Adobe Dynamic Link.
OverView
Production Excellence: After Effects now features a Graph Editor, which offers complete visual control over keyframe editing and easy synchronization of animated properties across layers. 32-bit float High Dynamic Range (HDR) color support (Professional only) provides an unprecedented level of precision and realism to color operations, allowing After Effects to simulate the way light behaves in the real world. Support has been added or updated for 32-bit audio, as well as for many additional file formats, including native HDV, Camera Raw, OpenEXR, and 32-bit Photoshop and TIFF.
Intelligent Workflow: Among the biggest changes to version 7.0 of After Effects is the redesigned and uni-fied user interface, featuring customizable docking panels and task oriented workspaces to match production needs. Enhanced OpenGL support provides accelerated interactivity and high-fidelity rendering. But there’s much more than meets the eye: this new version also delivers enhanced integration with other popular Adobe products including Adobe Photoshop® CS2 and Adobe Production Studio, making working between Adobe applications more seamless than ever. An integrated Script Editor (Professional only) allows you to edit scripts inside of After Effects. And with the addition of Adobe Bridge, browsing or searching digital assets (including working with XMP metadata), and previewing and applying new animation and behavior presets is easier than ever.
Creative Empowerment: After Effects 7.0 offers hundreds of effects and transitions, as well as new animat-ed text, effect, transition, background, and behavior presets, helping to jump-start your creativity so that you spend less time getting going and more time refining the result. Also included are new project templates for creating show opens, animated backgrounds, and DVD motion menus. Timewarp (Professional only) allows extraordinary control over how retimed frames interpolate. The new Pixel Motion mode of frame-blend-ing automatically tracks individual pixel data using motion vectors for smoother transitions between source frames. Smart Blur softens fill areas in detailed images without destroying edge detail. And new Lens Blur recreates the realistic effect of a defocused camera lens.
Production Excellence
When you need to deliver precise results without compromise, you want to work with After Effects. A new Graph Editor allows you to synchronize the timing of multiple properties and layers, which can be essential for producing sophisticated animations. 32-bit float High Dynamic Range (HDR) color (Professional only) allows you to work with the full range of visible light, combining color values in the same way that they interact in the real world. The full brightness of illuminated elements is retained even when they are blurred or defocused. Support has also been added for many more image formats including native HDV, Camera Raw and OpenEXR, helping you to deliver professional results.
Graph Editor
Animating in After Effects is done with unprecedented control, thanks to the new Graph Editor, which allows you to display and edit animation properties from multiple layers together. Use free transform con-trols to synchronize and scale groups of keyframes from an offset point that you specify. Edit value or speed graphs for spatial properties such as Position, or let After Effects choose the type of graph most appropriate for a given property.
Animation curves are each displayed in a unique color; three-dimensional spatial values appear as individu-al colors, mapped to red, green, and blue for x, y, and z. You can choose to display all selected properties, all of the animated properties for a given layer, or only the properties you mark for display. Select and modify curves and keyframes using the same set of tools as you use with masks.
Keyframe eases can be added with a single click. Keyframes snap to particular points as you drag them hori-zontally or vertically around the Graph Editor. The familiar Zoom tool, Hand tool, and your mouse scroll wheel allow you to freely zoom into and pan around graphs. You can also choose fit all graphs to the current view at any time.
HDR Color Support (Professional only)
32-bit High Dynamic Range (HDR) color support represents far more than just “more colors,” or even “greater accuracy,” although it certainly provides both. Whereas 8-bit images contain 256 brightness values per channel, and 16-bit images, 32,768 values, HDR images use a floating point representation that is 32 bits long. Floating-point numbers represent a huge range of values, up to 10 to the 38th power. Just as in nature, visible light values with orders-of-magnitude difference between them are accurately represented.
HDR images represent the entire dynamic range of the visible world. Luminance levels that would be “blown out” — pushed to full white, all detail lost – in ordinary 8-bit or even 16-bit color are preserved. In addition, light values behave in a manner much more similar to how light behaves in the real world. As a result, blurs (including motion blur) and other real-world lighting effects look far more natural.
HDR color values can be saved in 32-bit Photoshop files, as well as 32-bit OpenEXR and TIFF formats, preserving the full dynamic range of all footage. Or use the Cineon format to save output as 10-bit log files, which offer more detail in the highlights and shadows than standard 8-bit formats.
HDV Support
After Effects 7.0 includes support for native HDV format footage in both of its specifications: 720p and 1080i. Presets are included for creating HDV-compatible compositions and renders. With the Adobe Pro-duction Studio, you can capture footage in Adobe Premiere Pro, using Import > Capture in Premiere Pro. Captured footage is automatically imported into your After Effects project.
Faster Mask Rendering
Mask rendering time has been in many cases cut in half, a performance increase that will help make roto-scoping and other animations involving the complex use of masks more efficient.
32-bit Audio Support
Step up to 32-bit audio support in After Effects 7.0. Share 32-bit audio files created in Adobe Audition, and use stereo mixing, parametric EQ, and attenuation at this higher bit rate.
Project Color Space
A new color management option helps reconcile the differences between color output by different devices by allowing you to select a pre-defined working color space for your project. Choices include Adobe RGB, ColorMatch RGB, and sRGB. With proper monitor profiling, footage color will appear consistent regardless of the display.
Video Preview Scaling
Preview any size composition on an external monitor. When previewing footage that has a different size or aspect ratio than your video preview monitor, After Effects will scale or letterbox the image to fit the display. Use RAM Previews to check footage on an external video monitor without having to match scale settings.
Intelligent Workflow
Missing deadlines isn’t an option. Adobe After Effects helps you get the job done with a clean, contempo-rary interface that employs a simple, pleasing color scheme and lets you focus on your work. High-fidelity OpenGL previews and renders a greater range of elements faster than ever. Integration with key tools such as Adobe Photoshop CS2, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Adobe Encore DVD allows not only a more fluid work-flow, but consistency of familiar user interface elements. With its versatile workflow and smart rendering options, After Effects delivers the efficiency you require in a professional post-production pipeline.
Unified User Interface with Panels that Dock and Group
The newly unified After Effects 7.0 user interface is customizable and easy on the eyes. While the tools, palettes, menus, and keyboard shortcuts remain familiar and uniform across the Adobe products, the After Effects user interface now consists of tabbed panels which automatically resize and reconfigure themselves, saving valuable screen space and time. No more overlapping palettes and repeated re-arranging; now it’s easy to organize your workspace.
Grouping allows you to collect panels together and manage them as a single, tabbed set; docking lets you lock such sets together in any order you like, leaving no wasted screen real estate. Task-based workspaces allow you to quickly modify the user interface based on what you are doing. You can also create floating windows — containing multiple grouped or docked panels — that hover over your main window. This can be particularly useful when working with multiple monitors. Additionally, take advantage of new side-by-side view windows that make comparing two sets of footage easy.
High-fidelity Accelerated OpenGL Support
After Effects 7.0 adds accelerated output quality via OpenGL 2.0. Included is support for common blend-ing modes as well as motion blur on 2D layers, anti-aliasing, track mattes, 3D shadows, transparency, and accelerated rendering of common effects. Previews of 2D and 3D layers are rendered at up to three times previous speed.
Furthermore, it is now possible to create not only previews but also final renders in OpenGL, allowing you to preserve the look of your work while leveraging the performance of this standard throughout your After Effects pipeline.
Adobe Bridge
Adobe Bridge simplifies the everyday tasks of asset management by offering powerful methods to browse, search, preview, and apply digital assets, as well as manage files, run batch processes, and work with metadata.
Evolved from the acclaimed File Browser introduced with Photoshop 7.0, Adobe Bridge is your navigational
control center for managing both audio and visual files, for use with After Effects as well as the entire Adobe Production Studio.
Preview and Apply Animation and Behavior Presets and Templates:
Organize assets: Adobe Bridge helps you quickly organize, browse, locate, and view the assets you need every day with visual previews and scalable thumbnails, as well as previews of audio files. View Photoshop images, documents, and a variety of standard graphics files.
Powerful file searching and labeling using XMP metadata: Search for files on a hard drive or across a network using extensive metadata information that you establish (or which is provided to you), including titles, authors, descriptions, keywords, captions, camera data, and more. Save searches as collections that you can recall any time.
Convenient access to stock photos: Browse and search royalty-free images from leading stock photo agen-cies using Adobe Stock Photos in one convenient, familiar location. Purchase images from several agencies in a single shopping cart and manage you imagery from within After Effects and Adobe Production Studio. Adobe Stock Photos include metadata to help you manage and search for your files in Bridge.
Multiple-file Camera Raw processing: Adjust, crop, and process multiple raw images simultaneously and copy and paste settings between files. Adobe Bridge serves as an asset management hub, and it is linked to Adobe Production Studio. It also helps to coordinate operations between individual Adobe applications.
Unmatched Integration
Leverage the power of an integrated suite of Adobe tools. Whether you are using After Effects 7.0 together with an individual program such as Adobe Photoshop CS2, or whether you take advantage of the full scope of Adobe Production Studio (Windows only), multiple enhancements make the experience of working among multiple Adobe applications more dynamic and much smarter.
Adobe Photoshop CS2 Integration
Photoshop files can now be saved with bit depths greater than 8-bit per channel, so your HDR and 16-bit images maintain color integrity when you move them between Photoshop and After Effects. You can also now create a new Photoshop layer in your After Effects composition, and Photoshop automatically opens a blank file the size of the composition, ready for editing. When you save the Photoshop file, the changes ap-pear in After Effects.
Adobe Dynamic Link with Adobe Premiere Pro or Adobe Encore DVD (Adobe Production Studio only)
In the past, when incorporating visual effects into a video edit, or motion graphics as a DVD motion menu, updating content to address client feedback and other changes was tedious. Changes made in one applica- tion would have to be carefully managed in the others and then re-rendered and re-imported, an inefficient and time-consuming workflow. Adobe Production Studio offers a compelling alternative: the ability to cre-ate live links between projects in After Effects and either Adobe Premiere Pro or Adobe Encore DVD.
Dynamic Link eliminates the need to render an After Effects composition before importing it into Adobe Premiere Pro or Adobe Encore DVD. All of the After Effects layers remain accessible, and changes made in After Effects can be previewed instantly within Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Encore DVD, without the need to render a movie first. This allows you to make changes quickly and to render only when you finalize your results.
Adobe Premiere Pro Integration
There are other, easier ways in which it is easier to share information among these applications. An After Effects project can now be exported as an Adobe Premiere Pro project (Windows only), maintaining folders as bins, individual edits, markers, keyframed effects, nested sequences, transitions, and more. You can also freely drag and drop, or copy and paste source clips from one application to the other. Effects can be applied in one application and rendered in another; for example, you can make adjustments in Adobe Premiere Pro using the 3-Way Color Corrector and render that effect at higher color depth in After Effects (Windows only). You can also initiate the process of capturing footage in Adobe Premiere Pro within After Effects (Production Studio only), or use a command to edit audio in Adobe Audition.
Integrated Script Editor (Professional only)
Creating scripts in After Effects 7.0 is now even easier thanks to a new, integrated Script Editor, which offers you a convenient interface for creating and testing scripts. Create scripts without the need for an external text editor, and then execute them one step or breakpoint at a time. You can inspect all data for a running script, profiling individual functions for timing and hit count data. Like After Effects itself, the Script Editor uses docked panels in a unified window. Code is displayed in contextual colors with line numbering.
Help Center
The new Adobe Help Center floats above After Effects 7.0 in its own window, making it easier to use its improved search features and task-based help topics. It includes faster searches of hundreds of conceptual and reference topics.
Auto-SaveAfter Effects 7.0 also includes a new Auto-Save option. When the number of files saved reaches a maximum number which you specify, the Auto-Save feature can overwrite files starting with the oldest, preventing the extra clutter of outdated projects.
Automatically Detect Timecode Base
A new setting in the Project Settings dialog will automatically detect the timecode base to use when displaying timecode anywhere in the interface. It is still possible, but generally no longer necessary, to set the timecode base manually in Project Settings.
Enhanced Auto-Trace
Autotrace is now more accurate at converting bitmap images into mask shapes. It generates Bezier shapes, which require fewer points for accurate tracing; this makes editing of points much easier.
Creative Empowerment
The creative options in Adobe After Effects are inexhaustible, so your work can have infinite variety. More than 223 effects — from creative blur effects to color correction tools and options for stylizing the looks of layers—are included in the Professional edition. Hundreds of fully customizable animation presets make it easy to instantly create compelling motion graphics and titling.
Hundreds of New Animation and Behavior Presets
Produce great-looking, distinctive animations and animated effects easily using animation presets and behavior
presets, including text, effects, transitions, animated backgrounds, and keyframeless animation behaviors. Or use them as a starting point to be customized for your own use, even saving animation properties as reusable
presets. Professionally designed presets include:
dynamic elements for your compositions such as glows, grids, flares, particles, and streaks
animated backgrounds
unique transitions including paint-ons, slides, stretches, zooms, drips, ripples, and more
specialized behaviors such as drifts, flashes, wiggles, and bounces
useful effects such as light leaks and night vision, blooms and lighting, and colorization
Project templates
Use one of dozens of professionally designed project templates to place footage into an motion menu, show open, or animated background, or freely customize a design to make it your own.
Retiming
New to After Effects 7.0 are retiming effects that analyze the motion of individual pixels from frame to frame, generating motion vectors that are then used to interpolate pixel data. The end result is the creation of new in-between frames with smooth, crisp results and minimal artifacts.
Timewarp (Professional only)
Timewarp is a full-fledged retiming tool. It provides a high degree of control over how the image data of retimed footage is interpolated. You can specify how many motion vectors are created for interpolation, the level of smoothing, and the weighting of individual color channels. This level of control allows you to specify exactly how smooth your result will be.
Pixel Motion
Pixel Motion is an advanced, high-quality alternative to Frame Mix mode when Frame Blending is activated in the timeline. Whereas Frame Mix simply cross-dissolves between adjacent frames, Pixel Motion uses the Timewarp engine to create smoother, crisper results automatically, without the need to adjust individual controls. When activated on footage whose timing has been altered, it just works.
Creative Blur Effects
Not all blurs are created equal. Specific production situations call for specialized blur operations, and After Effects 7.0 introduces two new types of blur.
Lens Blur
When the lens of a physical camera is defocused, the resulting blur in the image is different from a normal blur operation in a few key ways. With a defocused lens, bright highlights maintain full brightness as they bloom outward; a normal blur operation effectively dims them down, averaging the bright pixels with dimmer surrounding ones. These highlights also will often have a particular shape that results from the shape of the camera’s iris; for example, a camera with a hexagonal iris (six blades) will yield a hexagonal highlight. These highlights are sometimes also known as “circles of confusion”; you would not see them with the naked eye, but only through the lens of a camera.
The Lens Blur effect recreates these faithfully and offers you full control over their appearance. It is useful in situations that contain bright flares in motion, or which should appear as if they were shot with a defocused camera lens.
Smart Blur
Smart Blur carefully analyzes an image before blurring it and then blurs only the fill areas of images, maintaining
all of the edge detail. This makes it possible to soften uniform areas of an image without softening the entire image. You specify a radius which determines how far Smart Blur searches for dissimilar pixels to blur, and a threshold, which determines how low the contrast of a given pixel should be with surrounding pixels before it is blurred.
Expanded File Format Support
Take advantage of new support for native HDV, Camera Raw, OpenEXR (Professional only), AAF (Professional
only), 10-bit YUV (v210), and 32-bit TIFF and PSD formats (Professional only).
Enhanced Liquify Effect
The Liquify effect is no longer limited to the boundaries of the layer to which it’s applied; use Liquify’s distortion brushes to stretch images as far as you need.
Added Value
After Effects 7.0 Professional edition also includes Keylight from The Foundry, and all versions of After Effects 7.0 include Synthetic Aperture’s Color Finesse and bundled effects from Cycore, the original
developers of Final Effects.
Pricing
After Effects Professional - $999
After Effects Standard - $699
Upgrade from any Professional edition version to After Effects 7.0
Professional - $199
Upgrade from any Standard edition version to After Effects 7.0 Standard - $199
Upgrade from any Standard edition version to After Effects 7.0 Professional - $499
- Upgrade from any previous version of After Effects to Adobe Production Studio Premium - $1,249
- Upgrade from any previous version of After Effects Standard to Adobe Production Studio Standard - $749
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