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(Page 3 of 4 pages for this article « First < 1 2 3 4 >) Filed under: *VIDEO* •CS4 •Motion Graphics •Visual Effects • After Effects CS4A quick tour of the new features that will be of interest to motion graphics artists.
One of the big pushes behind Adobe Creative Suite 4 is integration. In addition to the further-improved integration between After Effects and Premiere Pro (for example, you can now import an entire Premiere Pro project - not just an individual sequence), there are some really nice synergies between After Effects CS4 and other Adobe applications as well: Photoshop 3D LayersWe mentioned Adobe Labs earlier; it’s a good place to scour for hints of upcoming technologies. Several months ago, they made available a plug-in for Photoshop CS3 Extended which allowed to search for, download, and rasterize 3D models from Google Warehouse (click here for more information). Well, that technology has expanded considerably. It is now a full-blown feature in Photoshop CS4 Extended, allowing you to not only load 3D models in several formats and perform some rudimentary material manipulation and texture mapping, but also to export the result as a layered PSD file which can then be imported in After Effects CS4. Layers with 3D models can then interact with 3D cameras in After Effects. It’s not the same as having a full-blown 3D application such as Cinema 4D (or even the Zaxwerks Invigorator Pro plug-in for After Effects), but it does provide an intriguing alternative workflow.
By the way, Mark Christiansen just posted a video demo of using the Photoshop 3D to After Effects workflow; you can view it here. We’ve also made a video for Lynda.com on this feature; you can see it here. Export Comp from After Effects to FlashMore and more, After Effects and Flash are being used as a duo to create sophisticated (i.e. broadcast-quality) content for the web. However, previously there wasn’t a lot of integration between them: You could export animated text and some other objects from AE to a SWF file which could then be imported into Flash, but that was about it.
Curiously, we did not get the ability to export vector files such as Text or Shape layers intact; they get rasterized too. On the upside, Flash has a greatly-improved Motion Editor (shown below), which will make After Effects artists feel more at home.
Mobile Media SupportAfter Effects CS3 ships with an often-overlooked utility called Adobe Device Central, which provides basic template information for a wide range of cell phones and other mobile devices, and allows you to preview your media more or less in context on virtual versions of these devices. In CS4, Device Central has become a lot more useful. After selecting a group of devices that you would like to author for - many of which have different screen sizes and the such - you can export them as an After Effects CS4 project. Device Central will build a project that contains a Master comp (make sure you enable this option) which feeds device-specific comps for each device you chose. Then, a special Preview comp will show the results of these various devices side-by-side, making it easier to compare the effects of different screen sizes and crop areas. It’s very cool. The only obvious feature missing is to also include Render Settings and Output Module templates for these devices; hopefully we’ll see that down the road.
next page: Separate XYZ, and a round-up of additional new features & tweaks (Page 3 of 4 pages for this article « First < 1 2 3 4 >) 
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In AE CS4, you can now export a composition as an XFL format file, which can then be opened in Flash CS4 Professional (yes, just as with Photoshop, there are two versions of Flash now) as a project. Each layer will be imported as its own separate layer and media file into Flash. If the layer in After Effects was already a PNG, JPEG, or FLV (AE CS4 can import FLV files now, by the way), and you only applied simple transforms to that layer inside AE, the layer will not be recompressed, and the transformations will be preserved in Flash (although you will get one keyframe per frame of animation - ugh). Any other layer will be rendered as a PNG sequence or FLV file; just make sure you enable the alpha channel option in the compressor dialog when you export!
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