Adobe After Effects v6.5 Professional product reviews

I have always had aspirations to make movies, to take the scenes that form in my head throughout the day and to transcribe them to a digital format so that I may store them, tweak them, make them real and alive. I have tried a few other packages in the past, such as Adobe Premiere, and Macromedia's Director... but always found them to be overly technical, requiring far too much reading and lead-up before actually getting hands-on. I always prefer applications that not only allow, but promote experimentation, hands-on play and exploration.

I finally found it. And here it is. After Effects pro v6.5 has eveything I could dream of plus so much more, and the ability to plug more features into it, expanding it into something so amazing and powerful that it might be the one and only compositing application you will ever need.

Something to keep in mind, this movie does have some shortcomings, easily compensated for by the addition of another application package such as Pinnacle Studio DV, or even Microsoft's MovieMaker which comes standard with most versions of the Windows OS. These will compliment A.E. so well that with the addition of the Adobe Creative Suite 2 you have everything you will need to make your dreams a movie-length reality.

So what make's A.E. so great? How I wish I had room to list them all! But here's some highlights:
    •  Full virtual 3d environment: With the click of a single gadget, any 2d or 3d object imported can be rotated, translated or distorted within a user-defind 3d workspace. eg. Take a flat image, and rotate it about the Z axis, making it spin like a coin on it's edge.
    •  Particle World integrated: That's right, the powerful Particle World add-on is now built-in, allowing you unprecedented creativity. eg. Draw a volcano in Photoshop, import it, and use Particle World to render flowing lava and explosive pyroclastic clouds.
    •  Easily reconfigured workspace: Put any window where you want it, even across multiple screens, and save the workspace as your own customised working environemt.
    •  Huge array of file formats that can be imported: Everything from WAV and MP3, Photoshop Documents, EPS and Illustrator files, Adobe Acrobat PDFs, and every major graphics format, totalling almost 50 acceptables. This means you can use almost anything you can find, make or locate.

The only major downside I found was that even though my machine has one and a half gig of RAM, plus 10gig of Virtual RAM, I could not make a "RAM Preview" of the movie more than 30 seconds long. When the trial project was a mere 45 seconds long, and estimated to make a final movie around 5megs in size, this was a highly annoying setback, forcing me to do a final rendering of the movie at every stage, totalling 4 hours of wasted time. This is, as far as I can tell after only a few weeks of exploring, the major glitch that needs to be addressed.

Overall, a wonderful package. In the 3 weeks I have been working with it I have managed to create over half a dozen movies ranging from 20 second adverts for unreal products, to a 2 minute long Animated Christmas Card I can send out to all our clients and suppliers. This is truely a wonderful package, well worth serious consideration. If the next version allows the integration of the Adobe Bridge system, this would just round it off nicely.