After Effects region of interest

Perhaps the most exciting new feature in After Effects CS5.5 is the Warp Stabilizer effect. This effect automatically stabilizes a shot, removing unwanted motion.

Chris and Trish Meyer review the Warp Stabilizer effect on the ProVideo Coalition website, as well as providing a very detailed and absolutely crucial set of video tutorials on Adobe TV. Please, watch these videos before using the Warp Stabilizer:

• introduction to the Warp Stabilizer
• basic properties of the Warp Stabilizer
• advanced properties of the Warp Stabilizer (mostly about synthesizing edges)
• using the Warp Stabilizer to stabilize a background, not a foreground

Video2Brain provides a set of videos about stabilizing motion:

• extended overview of Warp Stabilizer effect
• details of Warp Stabilizer effect controls
• using the point tracker (legacy tracker) for stabilizing motion
• brief overview and demonstration of the Warp Stabilizer effect

Mark Christiansen also reviews the Warp Stabilizer effect as part of an overall review of After Effects CS5.5 on the ProVideo Coalition webiste, and he gives some basic instructions in a video on the Lynda.com website.

Yes, there have already been features—both in After Effects and in other software—that have provided motion stabilization capabilities, but these have been more labor intensive and not as capable of dealing with various problems that come from undesired camera movement.

If you’ve ever used other motion stabilization tools, you know that the stabilization process results in gaps around the shot as the layer is moved to compensate for unwanted camera motion. The conventional way to deal with these gaps has been to scale and/or crop the shot, losing information and resolution. The Warp Stabilizer effect provides the option of synthesizing edges, filling in the gaps around the edges with image information from previous or subsequent frames. Advanced parameters provide a high degree of control over how the edges are synthesized and the gaps filled in.

Another problem with conventional motion stabilization techniques that merely move and skew an entire layer is that they don’t deal with the problems of parallax—the changes in perspective as a camera shifts its position relative to the foreground subject and the background. The Warp Stabilizer analyzes many, many points in each frame and determines how to subtly distort (warp) the image to remove unnecessary motion and remove these artifacts of parallax. Rolling shutter artifacts common to HDSLR cameras can also be diminished.

The Warp Stabilizer effect is the outgrowth of the work of many people, including university researchers and members of the Adobe research team. Jue Wang gives some insight into the technology leading up to the Warp Stabilizer effect here.

For details of all new and changed features in After Effects CS5.5, see this page.

Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Master Collection and Production Premium editions include Adobe Audition CS5.5, which is a much more powerful audio editing application than was Adobe Soundbooth, included in previous versions.

After Effects CS5.5 includes an Edit In Adobe Audition command.

Chris and Trish Meyer provide a pair of video tutorials that show how to use Audition with After Effects:

• basics: the After Effects / Audition workflow
• advanced: details of Audition for After Effects

Video2Brain provides a video overiew of how to use Audition to modify audio from After Effects.

For more information about using Audition with After Effects, see “Working with video applications” in the Audition CS5.5 Help document and “Editing audio in Adobe Audition” in the Adobe Premiere Pro Help document.

For complete details of what’s new and changed in After Effects CS5.5, see this page.

After Effects CS5.5 includes many changes related to how timecode and time values are used, interpreted, displayed, and preserved on export.

For a video demonstration of these changes, see this video on the Video2Brain website.

Chris Meyer shows the most important of these changes in this video.

The biggest of these changes is relatively simple to state but is still a big deal: After Effects can now read, use, and preserve timecode information in source files. This is one of those things that we have been wanting to do for a long time, and we got quite a few feature requests about it.

For details of the expression changes related to source timecode, see this page.

Here’s a list of changes regarding timecode and time values:

• The Timecode effect can now read source timecode, which can be useful for all sorts of things, including adding burned-in timecode (BITC). This effect has also been given better controls for color, opacity, and blending with the original layer.
• Settings for time display style have been changed in several ways. Whether timecode is shown as dropframe or non-dropframe is no longer a project setting. Each composition can be set to use either dropframe or non-dropframe timecode, in the Composition Settings dialog box.
• The upper-left corner of the Timeline panel now shows a dual-time display (top line being the current time display such as timecode, and the bottom smaller line showing the alternate display such as frames). The bottom line also shows the current composition frame rate.
• The Indeterminate Media NTSC preference specifies how imported items are interpreted if it is not clear from the contents of the file whether they use dropframe or non-dropframe timecode.
• Added columns in the Project panel for showing In point, Out point, and duration for trimmed footage items in the Project panel. This is in addition to columns added for media start, media end, media duration, and tape name, which were added as part of the expansion of support for source timecode.
• Added Layer Sub-objects method sourceTime(t = time), which returns the source time corresponding to time t.
• Added ntscDropFrame method to Comp and Footage objects to return true if the item uses NTSC dropframe format for timecode.
• Added optional ntscDropFrame argument to the timeToCurrentFormat method. Default: ntscDropFrame = thisComp.ntscDropFrame
• Added Display Comp Time animation preset in Animation Presets > Text > Expressions category.

For complete details of what’s new and changed in After Effects CS5.5, see this page.

The free, 30-day trial version of After Effects CS6 is available. Download it now.

The trial version of After Effects CS5 and earlier had a major shortcoming: It lacked many software components that we licensed from other companies, including many codecs for importing and exporting common formats, such as MPEG-2, AVCHD, and RED (R3D) media. The same applied to plug-ins and utilities that we license and include with After Effects. This meant that people had a hard time evaluating the software for real-world use.

Things have changed for After Effects CS6, making the trial version more useful for its intended purpose—letting you try the software as you will really use it.

The trial version of After Effects CS6 includes all of the codecs and effect plug-ins that are included with the full version of After Effects CS6. This means that you can import and export to all of the supported file formats using the trial version.

The trial version of After Effects CS6 also includes the Keylight plug-in, mocha-AE, mocha shape, Cycore (CC) effects, and Color Finesse. (Hooray!)

For lists of formats that you can import into and export from After Effects, see these pages:

• formats that you can import into After Effects CS6
• formats that you can export from After Effects CS6

For details about everything that’s new and changed in After Effects CS6, see this page.

Creating and working with stereoscopic 3D scenes is much more convenient in After Effects CS5.5. Here’s a list of new and changed features in this area, with links to pages with more information:

• new stereoscopic 3D camera rig for automatically creating a set of nested compositions and cameras, linked together by expressions
• improved 3D Glasses effect, with added properties for refining stereoscopic 3D output
• new camera commands for automating common tasks: Link Focus Distance To Point Of Interest, Link Focus Distance To Layer, Set Focus Distance To Layer

Chris and Trish Meyer provide a detailed set of video tutorials about these features on the Adobe TV website: new stereoscopic 3D camera rig new stereoscopic 3D scene controls improved 3D Glasses effect refining a stereoscopic 3D scene: focus and convergence

Amir Stone, the software engineer responsible for the stereoscopic 3D features in After Effects, has written a document explaining the theory and practice of stereoscopic 3D: “Understanding stereoscopic 3D in After Effects”. This document is recommended reading for anyone using stereoscopic 3D, since Amir provides much practical information about how people perceive visual information and what this means for creating and modifying stereoscopic 3D scenes.

Video2Brain provides a video overview of the new stereoscopic 3D features in After Effects CS5.5.

Karl Soule provides a video that demonstrates working with and previewing stereoscopic 3D elements in After Effects and a video that explains how to edit stereoscopic 3D material in Adobe Premiere Pro.

For more information about stereoscopic 3D and Adobe software, see the stereoscopic 3D page on the Adobe website.

Rich Young has been tracking resources about stereoscopic 3D in After Effects on his AE Portal website. The new and improved stereoscopic 3D features in After Effects CS5.5 make things much easier than described in these resources for After Effects CS5, but many of these resources are still valuable.

For details about all new and changed features in After Effects CS5.5, see this page.

After Effects CS5.5 includes many improvements related to 3D cameras and depth-of-field blurs. It’s now much easier to get high-quality animated rack focus, bokeh, and other results that depend on selectively blurring items depending on their distance from a camera. It’s also a lot easier to set up and animate cameras.

• Added new Camera Lens Blur effect.
• Added new camera layer settings related to depth-of-field blur, iris shape, and highlights.
• Added new camera commands for automating common tasks related to focus distance: Link Focus Distance To Point Of Interest, Link Focus Distance To Layer, Set Focus Distance To Layer.
• Added new camera command for automatically creating a null-object layer and connecting it to a camera: Create Orbit Null.
• Removed discrepancies in behaviors of Track Z Camera tool and Track XY Camera tool depending on whether they were activated directly from the Tools panel or by using the mouse buttons with the Unified Camera tool. In After Effects CS5, the behaviors differed with regard to the point of interest and zoom.

Chris and Trish Meyer provide a detailed set of video tutorials about these new features:

• depth-of-field and iris properties in camera layer
• camera depth-of-field utilities
• orbit camera rigs
• Camera Lens Blur effect

One of the things that Chris mentions about the Camera Lens Blur effect is that it renders much faster than the old Lens Blur effect. Yep. Much. One of the big reasons that the Camera Lens Blur effect is so much better is that it doesn’t disable Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing, as the Lens Blur effect did.

Video2Brain also provides a set of videos explaining and demonstrating these new features:

• Create Orbit Null command for camera rigs
• Camera Lens Blur effect
• depth-of-field and iris settings for camera layers

For a complete list of what’s new and changed in After Effects CS5.5, see this page.

I’m one of the people who reads and processes the feature requests that are submitted for After Effects, so I know how many requests we get for the ability to save projects backward so that they can be opened by a previous version of After Effects. It’s a lot of requests.

So, in After Effects CS5.5, we’ve added this feature. You can now save a project from After Effects CS5.5 as a project that can be opened in After Effects CS5 or later. The command is File > Save As > Save A Copy As CS5.

There are caveats, though. Chris and Trish Meyer cover this new feature and its caveats in this video on Adobe TV.

Features that are in After Effects CS5.5 but not in After Effects CS5 are not retained when you open the project in After Effects CS5. However, (most of) the features that are new in After Effects CS5.5 are still stored in the project, so you can still open the After Effects CS5 copy of the project in After Effects CS5.5 and get those features. The video from Chris and Trish Meyer shows a couple of examples of this working.

This doesn’t work in all cases, though, such as in those cases in which a feature has been reorganized rather than merely added in After Effects CS5.5. For example, the 3D Glasses effect has new properties in After Effects CS5.5, and these properties aren’t saved in the After Effects CS5 version of the project. If you find any instances in which the conversion between project versions doesn’t work as expected, let us know with a bug report.

Please keep those feature requests (and bug reports) coming. We really do value them and consider them.

For more about what’s new and changed in After Effects CS5.5, including details on how to order, see this post.

In previous versions of After Effects, getting the light intensity to “fall off” (decrease with distance from the light source) was difficult, requiring third-party plug-ins or hacks using expressions.

After Effects CS5.5 provides built-in light falloff as a feature of light layers.

Chris & Trish Meyer provide a video on Adobe TV that shows how light falloff works.

For a demonstration of the new light fall-off feature, see this video on the Video2Brain website.

For more about what’s new and changed in After Effects CS5.5, including details on how to order, see this post.

After Effects CS5.5 is available, and you can get it now. You can also download a free 30-day trial version.

Here’s a link to the main After Effects page and its whiz-bang summary of what’s new.

Chris and Trish Meyer provide a detailed set of movies on Adobe TV that cover what’s new and changed in After Effects CS5.5.

Video2Brain provides a comprehensive set of movies that covers every new and changed feature in After Effects CS5.5.

Mark Christiansen reviews After Effects CS5.5 on the ProVideo Coalition website.

If you want to ask questions about these new and changed features, come on over to the After Effects user-to-user forum. That’s the best place for questions. Questions left in comments on a blog post are much harder to work with; the blog comment system just isn’t set up for conversations. It’s also never too early to leave comments on the pages of the Help documents to ask for more information, point out areas that aren’t clear, and so on; Kevin, the guy who writes the Help documents, wants your input.

• Warp Stabilizer effect for stabilizing motion within a shot
• improved depth-of-field blur features, including Camera Lens Blur effect and new camera layer settings relating to depth-of-field blur and bokeh
• ability to read, use, and preserve source timecode, including with an improved Timecode effect, as well as many other timecode-related improvements
• stereoscopic 3D features, including new stereoscopic 3D camera rig and improved 3D Glasses effect
• better disk caching and default memory settings, for improved performance
• light fall-off, for controlling how intensity of lights relates to distance
• improved raw digital cinema features, including CinemaDNG import and expanded RED (R3D) features (e.g., REDcolor2, REDgamma2, REDlogFilm, better curves and levels UI)
• improved and expanded color look-up table (LUT) features
• XDCAM EX and XDCAM HD output (as MXF OP1a)
• integration with Adobe Audition CS5.5 for audio editing
• ability to save a project backward as an After Effects CS5 project

Here is a virtually comprehensive list of changes beyond the top ten listed above.

projects and compositions

• Settings for time display style have been changed in several ways. Whether timecode is shown as dropframe or non-dropframe is no longer a project setting. Each composition can be set to use either dropframe or non-dropframe timecode, in the Composition Settings dialog box.
• The upper-left corner of the Timeline panel now shows a dual-time display (top line being the current time display such as timecode, and the bottom smaller line showing the alternate display such as frames). The bottom line also shows the current composition frame rate.
• Added Pre-compose menu command to a layer’s context menu.
• After Effects CS5.5 can open and import projects created in After Effects 6.5 and later.

importing and managing footage items

• The Indeterminate Media NTSC preference specifies how imported items are interpreted if it is not clear from the contents of the file whether they use dropframe or non-dropframe timecode.
• Added columns in the Project panel for showing In point, Out point, and duration for trimmed footage items in the Project panel. This is in addition to columns added for media start, media end, media duration, and tape name, which were added as part of the expansion of support for source timecode.
• To sort columns in the Project panel in ascending or descending order, click the column heading.
• Moved the Interpretation Rules.txt file to the After Effects preferences folder. The file is created when the application starts.
• The trial version of After Effects CS5.5 includes all codecs included with the full version, so users of the trial version will be able to import any file that can be imported using in the full version.

layers, properties, cameras, and lights

• Drag with the Selection tool in the Composition panel to select multiple layers. (See this video for a demonstration of this feature.)
• Removed discrepancies in behaviors of Track Z Camera tool and Track XY Camera tool depending on whether they were activated directly from the Tools panel or by using the mouse buttons with the Unified Camera tool. In After Effects CS5, the behaviors differed with regard to the point of itnerest and zoom.
• Command-drag (Mac OS) or Ctrl-drag (Windows) an anchor point with the Pan Behind tool to snap the anchor point to the edge of a layer, to the center of a layer, or to a line extending from the edge of a layer. (See this video for a demonstration of this feature.)
• new camera commands for automating common tasks: Create Orbit Null, Link Focus Distance To Point Of Interest, Link Focus Distance To Layer, Set Focus Distance To Layer

views and previews

• Making changes in a dialog box with a Preview checkbox now updates the active panel, including Layer and Footage panels if appropriate (e.g., if editing settings in the Interpret Footage dialog box).

animation, keyframes, and expressions

• The Warp Stabilizer effect replaced the point tracker (used for stabilization in After Effects CS5 and earlier) in most contexts, including when choosing Stabilize Motion in the Tracker panel. The point tracker is still available, though, by choosing Stabilize in the Track Type menu in the Tracker panel.
• You can now use expressions to link together properties that aren’t represented with simple numbers or strings (sometimes referred to as “arbitrary data” or “custom data” properties). An example of such a property is the Curves property of the Curves effect. (See this video for a demonstration of this feature.)
• Added 3D Point Control effect in Expression Controls category.
• Added Layer Sub-objects method sourceTime(t = time), which returns the source time corresponding to time t.
• Added ntscDropFrame method to Comp and Footage objects to return true if the item uses NTSC dropframe format for timecode.
• Added optional ntscDropFrame argument to the timeToCurrentFormat method. Default: ntscDropFrame = thisComp.ntscDropFrame

effects and animation presets

• In addition to improvements made for reading timecode from a layer’s source, the Timecode effect has been given better controls for color, opacity, and blending with the original layer.
• Added Display Comp Time animation preset in Animation Presets > Text > Expressions category.
• Bilateral Blur effect changes in default values: Radius, 25.0; Threshold, 3.0; and Colorize, On.
• (Mac OS only) Levels effect keyboard shortcuts added: Ctrl+0 (RGB), Ctrl+1 (R), Ctrl+2 (G), Ctrl+3 (B), and Ctrl+4 (A) shortcuts.
• With the Effect Controls panel active, any shortcuts for an effect will be sent to the selected effects, or the first effect if none are selected.
• Reshape effect: Changed default Interpolation Method from Linear to Discrete.

memory, storage, and performance

• The caching system is now much smarter about determining what frames to add to the disk cache, and the default size of the disk cache is much larger (20GB).
• RAM and disk cache indicators (green and blue bars) can now be shown for individual layers, as well as for an entire composition. These layer cache indicators are off by default.
• The default Memory & Multiprocessing preference settings are now much more likely to provide good performance for common scenarios than were the defaults for After Effects CS5. We used feedback from users regarding these suggested settings to help us to determine the best settings.

plug-ins and scripts

• Keylight, Color Finesse, and mocha-AE (mocha for After Effects) have been updated for After Effects CS5.5.
• Keylight is available with the trial version of After Effects CS5.5.
• Color Finesse no longer requires a separate serial number, but you should enter a name and organization in the registration dialog box, or else the plug-in will run in trial mode.
• There are quite a few scripting changes. See this page for details.

rendering and exporting

• Added ability to drag a composition from the After Effects Project panel into Adobe Media Encoder to add it to the encoding queue. For other Adobe Media Encoder changes, see “Adobe Media Encoder CS5.5: What’s new and changed”
• Added Edit In Adobe Audition command in the Edit menu.
• If you select multiple render items that each have one output module, then assigning an output module template to any one of them will assign that output module template to the others. This doesn’t work for render items with multiple output modules. (See this video for a demonstration of this feature.)
• The trial version of After Effects CS5.5 includes all codecs included with the full version, so users of the trial version will be able to render and export using any codec that can be used in the full version.

keyboard shortcuts and miscellaneous user interface

• The Use System Shortcut Keys preference is now on by default. Hovering the mouse pointer over the checkbox for this preference shows the system and After Effects shortcuts affected.
• The search fields in the Project, Timeline, and Effects & Presets panels remember previously entered search terms.You can save terms that you use often, using a menu that opens when you click the search icon in the field. The search fields also now accepts a comma (,) as a logical “or” operator. (See this video for details.)
• It’s now easier to set up multiple Composition viewers in an edit-this-look-at-that (ETLAT) configuration. If you are viewing a composition in a hieararchy, lock the current Composition viewer, and then select another composition button upstream or downstream from it in either the Composition Navigator or Composition Mini-Flowchart. (See this video for details.)
• The Welcome And Tip Of The Day dialog box no longer opens if you start After Effects by double-clicking a project, opening a project from Bridge, or using Edit Original in Premiere Pro.
• (Windows only) Progress dialog box no longer moves the application to the front. This allows you to work in another application during scripted operations.

The After Effects CS5 (10.0.2) update has been released.

Ideally, you should check for and install updates by choosing Help > Updates from within After Effects (or another CS5 application).

If the automatic update doesn’t work, try the manual update. You can download the update packages from the download pages for Windows or Mac OS, using the “Adobe After Effects 10.0.2 update” link. The links are not at the top of the page, where I expected to find them.

Important: If you do download and install manuall, you must choose the correct patcher based on your original installation type: use the “Electronic Download” update package if you installed from a download; use the “Retail DVD” update package if you installed from a disc. (I found it confusing that the word ‘trial’ appears in the file name of the “Electronic Download” package, but that is indeed the correct package for updating the full version.)

If you haven’t already done so, you should also install the other recent updates for Premiere Pro, Adobe Media Encoder, and other CS5 applications.

If you have any problems with this update, or if you have bugs to report after applying the update, let us know by sending feedback or coming to the After Effects forum. Don’t ask questions in the comments on this blog post, which fewer people will see.

Here’s a complete list of things that we fixed in this update.

• After Effects CS5 (10.0.1) showed multiple instances of an “Unexpected data type” error when opening a project containing a missing effect.
• After Effects crashed when using the Directional Blur effect on a computer with 16 or more logical processor cores (i.e., counting virtual cores created by hyperthreading).
• After Effects crashed when opening a composition created by Automatic Duck Pro Import AE.

The After Effects CS5 (10.0.2) update is cumulative with the After Effects CS5 (10.0.1) update. I.e., the 10.0.2 update includes all of the fixes in the 10.0.1 update.

Note that we were able to find and fix these problems because of the great feedback that we got when we asked people to use the crash reporter. Please keep doing so. And don’t hesitate to file bugs and send feature requests.

If you use the Colorista II plug-in, be sure to update it to the most recent version.

If you use Trapcode Particular, be sure to install the most recent version.

We have also been working with several providers of plug-ins, codecs, and hardware devices (such as Cineform and BlackMagic) to assist them in updating their software to fix some errors and crashes. Please take this opportunity to download and install updated codecs, plug-ins, and drivers from these providers, as relevant to your work.

• Possible hang on start if firewall or other software (such as ZoneAlarm or FileMaker) blocks communication with After Effects and related components. (See this Technical Support document for more information and solutions.)
• Blocky artifacts in RGB color channels using Canon 5D MKII footage.
• BMP footage in a CS4 project opens as missing footage. Workaround: Relink footage after opening.
• RED (R3D) color science between versions: Projects saved in After Effects CS5 (10.0.0) that use the existing RED color science will use the new color science (version 2) when opened in After Effects CS5 (10.0.1 or 10.0.2). Also, RED settings are not retained if a project saved by After Effects CS5 (10.0.1 or 10.0.2) is opened in After Effects CS5 (10.0.0). If you are using R3D footage in a multiple-machine environment, make sure all machines are using the same version of After Effects.
• If another application acquires the RED ROCKET card before After Effects does, After Effects will fall back to software (non-ROCKET) rendering, with no warning message.