Compositing software comes in a number of packages. There’s Shake 4, Motion, Combustion, etc. And then there’s Adobe’s After Effects 7.0 Pro. Shake must be considered a special case, as it is probably the most feature-complete in terms of both raw power and user-comfort. I wanted to know if Shake can be compared to After Effects Pro at all. I asked a Shake expert, Marco Paolini, but he couldn’t even spare the 3 minutes that would have taken him to reply to my email --too busy with NAB. So, you’ll have to take my word for it: Shake is way up there. Then comes After Effects 7.0 Pro, and then the rest of them.

When I first started After Effects 7.0 Pro, I was almost literally knocked off my socks. Was this the ugly program I had trouble with reviewing in past versions because of a crowded and chaotic interface? After Effects 7.0 seems like it has had some serious plastic surgery. It doesn’t even look like After Effects anymore. But the interface is of course not much more than the surface. It’s what underneath what counts. Nevertheless, let me drool a bit longer over Adobe’s new looks. Nice, very nice. As nice as Aperture, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro and Motion.

Adobe has even made it so that you can adjust the interface completely as you see fit. Want an almost black interface? No problem, just move the Interface brightness slider all the way to dark. Everything will adjust to make everything darker, while preserving readability and clarity. Brighter? Drag the slider to the right and you almost find yourself gazing at the old After Effects again. Docking palettes, windows, views, saving workspaces, it can all be done now in After Effects 7.

The darkest setting…

...and the brightest setting.

Adobe with After Effects learning from Apple

After Effects remains a keyframe-driven compositing environment. However, Adobe shows things can still be improved despite the impression one could get from Apple’s deviating off that path with Motion. After Effects 7.0 Pro has a powerful Graph Editor to prove their point. The Graph Editor allows you to interactively edit speed or values of effects. The word powerful is justified here as you can drag keyframes in the Graph Editor without having to worry about the constraints of the window the Graph Editor is shown in.

The window boundaries will automatically move along with your mouse to allow unlimited edits of the curves. There’s a disadvantage to this as well, of course: you’d better have a fast computer to enjoy the benefits. My Power Mac G5 barely fits the system requirements, which is also very visible when you perform a RAM preview. After Effects is in that area not unique: Motion is power hungry as well.

Another new feature which is available in the Pro version is support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) colour. The support applies to footage as well as to photographs.

Just as Apple provides a large number of presets with Motion, so does Adobe with After Effects 7.0. Literally hundreds of animation presets make this package very complete. Project templates are included as well, although I must admit I found them to be less tempting than Apple’s. Adobe seems to have quickly assembled some templates to make users happy, without really wanting to show off the power of After Effects 7.0.

Of course, with factory presets come the ability to save your own presets. After Effects integrates with Bridge, so all of that stuff can be managed through the familiar Bridge interface if you have Creative Suite 2, that is. If you haven’t, After Effects pretty much is an application on its own.

After Effects 7.0 has better OpenGL support, called high-fidelity OpenGL by Adobe. But it will only work well with nVidia graphics. An ATI Radeon 9800 SE was classified as “not supporting” OpenGL at all, by the AE engine. Bad show!

Timewarp is a feature that is available in the Pro edition only. It slows down and speeds up footage without noticeable artefacts. Rendering Timewarp was prohibitively slow on my computer.