Adobe After Effects 7 Professional
By Wes McDermott
Where’s the Beef? Do you remember that Wendy’s commercial from the 80s? The one where that little old lady walked up to the counter determined to get her money’s worth of delicious, cholesterol-filled, artery-clogging hamburger beef, slam her hand on the counter and ask that most pertinent question: Where’s the Beef? Can you really blame her? That nice little old lady, probably on a fixed income, was just trying to make sure the burger was worth the buck. I can’t help but remember that commercial when it’s upgrade time. A company releases a new version with a host of tantalizing features. My mouth begins to water. I can’t resist the impulse. The thought of the latest and greatest running through my mind, paralyzing my ability to make rational decisions! The next thing I know, the wallet is coming out. But, before I throw down my hard earned cash, I must ask that crucial question: Where’s the beef?
Adobe has released its seventh version of “After Effects”. Adobe has some great flash movies and literature detailing the new features on their website http://www.adobe.com.
I don’t want to re-hash a list that anyone can read on the Adobe site. Instead, I want talk about the features that caught my eye. The ones that made me pony up the dough for the upgrade without a second thought. I want to talk about where’s the beef in After Effects 7 Pro!
32 Bit Support and Color Management
This is it! The mother of all features: 32 bit floating point. This is worth the upgrade price alone. If your 3D application supports HDR, and you combine it with “After Effects 7 Pro”, you now have a full HDR 3D/compositing pipeline.
(figure 1)
The other big compositing applications like, “Combustion”, “Digital Fusion”, and “Shake” all support floating point. “After Effects” has finally stepped up to the plate. In the previous versions of “After Effects”, users had to use “eLin” from Red Giant Software http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/elin.html, as a method to brilliantly cheat floating point. Why such a big deal you ask? For starters, it allows you to work in linear floating point. Working in a linear color space gives you the advantage of working with light and color the way it behaves in the real world. You also can begin to reference properties in your composition in more traditional photographic sense. If you want to brighten a layer by exactly 1 stop, you can. Another great benefit is having access to over-bright - whiter than white pixels in your composition. In reality, different light sources have different intensities. In an 8-bit environment, the different light sources’ intensity values are clipped to 255 or in floating point 1.0, but in 32 bit float environment, your pixel values can far exceed 255 or 1.0. This allows you to properly represent light sources in your footage and allows you full access to the light and dark areas of your scene. Like a photographer decides which zones of light to expose in a negative, using Exposure Control you can choose which areas of your HDR footage to expose.
