REVIEW: Web Graphics Sparkle With After Effects CS3 (Page 2)

My personal experience

My first work with After Effects CS3 was a web graphic for a digital document imaging, management and scanning company named Imagetek. I used the opportunity to get acclimated to the new application and see how it “felt” compared to After Effects 8. In my opinion, that application felt like a video graphics application while CS3 seems to have a lot more in common with Photoshop, Flash and other Adobe graphics applications. Workspaces make it easy to set the panel layout up so it’s not a mishmash of panels and monitors, which seems to be the norm for video applications. Some new features, such as moving individual text characters in 3-D space, appeal to motion graphics designers and not just video graphic designers.

I would say that After Effects CS3 has made a successful transition from strictly video to a more holistic view of motion graphics. Flash designers in particular should take a look at After Effects because to me it now feels like “Flash for bitmap graphics” (ironically, the comparison I hear most about After Effects is “Photoshop with a timeline”). Perhaps in the future we’ll see some other Flash features move into After Effects, such as ActionScript or maybe embedded Flash Video (After Effects only exports video to Flash Video). CS3 represents a quantum shift for After Effects beyond its video roots, and I am excited to see what happens with After Effects CS4 and beyond.

Flash, After Effects…or some other application?

If you’re a motion graphics designer, which application should you use? Flash? After Effects? Or even Photoshop, which has much more robust animation and video tools with CS3 Extended? Well, After Effects is not the only CS3 application that has had a quantum shift: I would say Flash CS3 Professional has also had a major shift from graphics and animation creation to rich web application creation. ActionScript is much more integral to the Flash experience than it used to be, and I would argue that Flash’s graphics tools have lagged behind as a result. After Effects, on the other hand, is still all about graphics, as is Photoshop. If bandwidth is not a major concern (and it often isn’t, given the penetration of broadband Internet), then After Effects may be the best motion graphics application out there for the World Wide Web. The only exceptions are the design of animated GIFs (use Photoshop) or animations that need to use little bandwidth (use Flash and its vector graphics). Otherwise, After Effects CS3 will give you the most impressive motion graphics.

Conclusion

If you are considering the upgrade to After Effects CS3, I would say go for it—there’s too many improvements and new features to wait for CS4, when there will inevitably be more to learn. Moreover, if you are designing web graphics, I think you should look at After Effects CS3 as the next-generation tool in your toolbox. It’s not the perfect motion graphics application (it still is primarily a video graphics application), but video and web graphics are converging and in ten years’ time most web graphics will look like After Effects video. Get in on it now and start learning! It’s a vast application and the learning curve is steep, but I know from personal experience that the results are awesome.

After Effects CS3 Professional
Adobe Systems
$999/$299 upgrade
Rating: 10/10