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Expert Insight into CS4
What’s New in After Effects CS4 by Chris and Trish Meyer
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CS4 update for Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects, Vol.4
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Track mattes, grouping, layer control and more
Focal Press After Effects Books
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What’s New in After Effects CS4
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Some of our favorite new features in the latest version of this cornerstone application.
On September 23 2008, Adobe announced After Effects CS4. We’d like to give you a quick overview of its major new features for motion graphics artists, plus tell you our plans for updating our books After Effects Apprentice and Creating Motion Graphics in relation to this new release. As is often the case with After Effects, the real news isn’t just in big new features, but in refinements to existing features, which help you get your work done faster.
New Effects: Cartoon, Bilateral Blur, and Turbulent Noise
We’ll start with some instant gratification: new effects.
The one that will get all of the headlines is the new Cartoon effect, which creates the cartoon-from-live-action look that’s been popular in some commercials and even movies the past few years. What’s special about the After Effects CS4 version is that it’s very easy to use with few parameters to learn, plus is GPU-accelerated so that it’s much more responsive than the third-party effects we’ve used in the past.
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The new Cartoon effect can quickly create stylized looks from live action footage. Footage courtesy Artbeats/Fitness.
Compared to a normal blur, the new Bilateral Blur effect has built-in edge detection. This means it blurs connected areas of an image that are similar, but keeps transitions sharp. This is useful for tricks such as blurring lines and wrinkles in a person’s face, or for more highly stylized looks. By default, it reduces the saturation in an image; enable the Colorize switch to get the color back. At higher Radius or Threshold settings, its GPU acceleration really kicks in; if you find yourself using lower settings to get more subtle results, it can slow down considerably.
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Bilateral Blur smoothes out similar areas of an image while keeping edges and transitions sharp. Footage courtesy Artbeats/Lifestyles Singles.
Turbulent Noise is an alternate version of the ever-popular Fractal Noise effect. The problem with Fractal Noise is that it’s slow – indeed, it was often used to test CPU speed! Turbulent Noise is GPU-accelerated, so it is much faster, making it far more interactive to weak. It uses a slightly different algorithm than Fractal Noise, so that it animates smoother, at the cost of not having a Cycle Evolution option for looping.
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The new GPU-accelerated Turbulent Noise effect can create a wide variety of natural and synthetic textures, such as the flames shown here (colorized using the Colorama effect’s Fire output palette preset).
Photoshop 3D Layers
A new technology Adobe has been playing around with is allowing Photoshop to import 3D models and render them, complete with the ability to pose them in 3D. You can then use Photoshop’s paint and other layer tools to customize the texture maps for these models. This feature was introduced as a plug-in for Photoshop CS3 Extended, and is now built into Photoshop CS4 Extended.
When you import a PSD file with a 3D object layer, After Effects CS4 will give you an option to make it a Live Photoshop 3D layer. By doing so, you can animate its pose in After Effects, as well as fly cameras around it in 3D space. It’s not as sophisticated as using Zaxwerks Invigorator Pro or ProAnimator inside After Effects, but it provides an interesting alternative workflow.
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Photoshop CS4 Extended can import and render 3D models (seen here). The resulting PSD file can be imported into After Effects, where you can animate the model as well as a 3D camera around it.
Independent XYZ
This has been on the wish list of advanced animators for years: the ability to keyframe the X, Y, and Z Position parameters independently from each other. After Effects users finally have this ability in CS4 without needing to resort to expressions or the Separate XYZ animation preset. As a result, complex camera fly-throughs or animations such as bouncing balls (where the object needs to bounce in the Y dimension, while traveling at a steady pace in the X or Z dimensions) have suddenly become much easier. This feature really shines when combined with the Graph Editor, as you can see all three curves overlaid on top of each other.
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The ability to separate the X, Y, and Z Position parameters makes it easier to craft certain types of animations, such as the bouncing ball path shown here.
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