Create motion graphics and visual effects with the industry standard 

Adobe After Effects CS5 software delivers the outstanding performance and visual richness required to succeed in todays media culture. New native 64-bit support lets you tap more of your computers power to work efficiently with complex HD, 2K, and 4K projects. Plus, a broad range of innovative features - from the revolutionary new Roto Brush to dozens of subtle but important changes that streamline your workflow - enable you to create amazing motion graphics and blockbuster visual effects while delivering your work to the widest possible variety of screens.

With Adobe After Effects CS5, you can:

Get 64-bit performance. Take advantage of all available RAM and processor cores to quickly craft complex 3D scenes and camera moves, work on large frames, preview long deeply-layered composites, and batch-render your results to a variety of output file formats.

Innovate visually. After Effects CS5 includes Mocha for After Effects CS5 v2 with the Mocha Shape plug-in, Color Finesse 3, and Digieffects FreeForm (note that these third-party plug-ins included with After Effects CS5 have a user interface that is English only). Combine this new power with the wide range of innovative 2D and 3D creation, compositing, and animation tools already in After Effects, and its clear that CS5 is a must-have release that expands your creative horizons.

Composite efficiently. Execute post-production tasks faster than ever - at maximum bit depth, and at virtually any frame size - thanks to the revolutionary new Roto Brush, new support for color LUTs, and other breakthroughs. Efficient production pipelines, including support for XMP metadata, are increasingly important in complex digital production workflows - and After Effects CS5 delivers innovations across the board.

Deliver everywhere. Work with a wider range of media types - now including AVC-Intra and expanded RED camera support - and render your final results in formats from mobile media to feature films at maximum bit depth and resolution, using industry-unique color management and new custom Color Look-Up Table (LUT) support to help ensure accurate results across a variety of delivery platforms.


Who uses After Effects?

Motion graphics designers and visual effects artists use After Effects to produce highly designed short-form content such as TV commercials, broadcast graphics, and film titles, and to create a wide range of visual effects shots. After Effects is able to handle a broad range of animation and compositing tasks, and offers timesaving integration with other essential tools: Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Illustrator CS5 software, 3D modeling applications such as Maxon CINEMA 4D and Autodesk Maya, and the editing software Adobe Premiere Pro. A rich ecosystem of third-party plug-ins means highly specialized solutions are readily available.

Video editors and other types of post-production professionals use After Effects to complement nonlinear editing tools such as Adobe Premiere Pro because it offers an efficient, well-integrated solution for delivering higher production values. When designing attention-getting show openers, lower thirds, and other types of motion graphics, After Effects offers timesaving presets and templates, as well as the ability to refine virtually every aspect of every design element. After Effects is also used by video editors to create effects and to handle a wide variety of post-production tasks, including color correction, motion tracking and stabilization, and keying and rotoscoping.

Interactive designers are turning to After Effects in ever-greater numbers because it offers flexible tools they can use to prepare dynamic media for use in interactive projects. Whether theyre creating videos with transparent backgrounds that can be composited with other elements in real time in Flash Player, designing snippets of persistent motion that add richness to an interactive experience, or creating visually distinctive text animations that stand out from the crowd, interactive designers benefit from tight integration between After Effects and Adobe Flash Professional.

Top new features of Adobe After Effects CS5

Native 64-bit application

One of the most significant advances in After Effects is that it is now a fully native 64-bit application. This yields numerous advantages, including the ability to fully use your computers memory for dramatic improvements when working on high-resolution projects.

Just a few years ago, it was normal to work on standard-definition video at a color depth of 8 bits per channel (bpc). Today, it is common to work on high-definition video at a depth of 16 bpc. And while some artists have used After Effects on film projects since the earliest versions, digital cinema cameras such as the RED One are now commonly in use - making 4K images in 32-bit floating-point color increasingly common. And the memory demands dont stop there. For example, RED has announced cameras that sport 5K, 6K, 9K, and even 28K frame sizes. Native 64-bit OS support in After Effects CS5 means you can work on ever-higher-resolution projects with confidence.

On 32-bit operating systems, the 2GB to 4GB memory restriction for each application sharply limit how many image frames can be held in RAM at the same time - which in turn constrains the length of full-motion previews and the complexity of projects overall. Even with disk caching and virtual memory, working with HD content using older versions of After Effects on 32-bit systems means you may be forced to wait while images are swapped in and out of RAM or re-rendered the next time they are needed. Resourceful artists have developed strategies to work around these limitations - such as working at lower resolutions or frame rates or using “proxies” of lower-quality sources - but these come with the trade-off of not seeing your composition in its final form while you work.

With After Effects CS5, these limitations no longer apply. Support for 64-bit operating systems means After Effects CS5 can access all of your computers available RAM. This has a dramatic, positive effect on the type, size, and complexity of projects you can take on - as well as how fluidly you can work. With After Effects CS5 running on a 64-bit operating system with 32GB of RAM, you can preview a 30-second HD comp at full resolution and at 32 bpc. This enables you to preview your entire composition at maximum fidelity without interruption.

Roto Brush

Many shots require separating a foreground object - such as an actor - from its current live action background so that the object may be placed in a completely new environment. The revolutionary new Roto Brush provides a fast, efficient solution for isolating these foreground elements in complex scenes. In the past, this kind of work was time-consuming and expensive, and as a result, the technique was often reserved for big-budget projects. The new Roto Brush is so fast that After Effects artists can now perform rotoscoping on virtually any project - from previsualization to final composites - with greatly reduced concern about project budgets or deadlines.

To use the new Roto Brush, just draw simple paint strokes inside the foreground object, and let After Effects calculate where the rest of the foreground object is. If the foreground and background are similar, you can draw additional paint strokes to teach After Effects which elements are in the background. After Effects determines where the foreground and background are on subsequent frames; you can refine results with additional strokes. The process is fast and intuitive - and because After Effects does the hard work of finding the edges, Roto Brush eliminates the tedium traditionally associated with the task.

Once youve defined the foreground and background areas, you can control the quality of the edges between the two using options for smoothing, feathering, or choking (spreading inside or outside of the original edge). After Effects can calculate motion blur for fast-moving portions of the edge to deliver photo-realistic, professional results with minimal effort. “Edge chatter” from frame to frame is automatically reduced, and in addition you can remove background color from semitransparent edges of the foreground object. And if the resulting alpha channel still requires additional refinement, you can use the paint tools already built into After Effects to further tweak your results.

mocha for After Effects CS5

Real-world projects typically require motion tracking, and many shots present tracking challenges such as elements that go partially out of frame or include motion blur. mocha for After Effects CS5 - an updated version of the software included with After Effects CS5 - has a unique planar tracker that makes it easy to handle even the most difficult tracking and stabilization tasks. Also included in this release is the mocha shape plug-in, which enables you to use tracking data in new ways. stabilization tasks. (mocha for After Effects CS5 and mocha shape have user interfaces that are English only.)

This updated release of mocha includes the ability to apply motion tracking to hand-drawn masks, which is a significant time-saver. In addition, motion-blurred or semitransparent areas are easily handled with new support for varible-width mask feathers. And like After Effects CS5, mocha for After Effects CS5 is a native 64-bit application.

Included for the first time in After Effects CS5, the mocha shape plug-in enables you to copy and paste multiple motion-tracked masks from mocha to any After Effects layer, fully preserving all their qualities, including any variable-width mask feather settings. This is particularly useful for shots that contain camera movements or moving objects that require masking.

One of the other new features you will find useful is that Bezier or X-spline animated roto shapes created in mocha may be converted into mask shapes in After Effects, where they can be further refined and manipulated without requiring a trip back into mocha. Also with mocha for After Effects CS5, motion blur data is now included in the exported tracking data. This enables you to re-create the motion blur that occurred in the original footage.

AVC-Intra support and expanded RED camera support

After Effects CS5 includes native support for the new AVC-Intra 50 and AVC-Intra 100 codecs, as well as expanded native support for footage from RED cameras.

AVC-Intra is used by high-quality Panasonic cameras like the AJ-HPX300, AJ-HPX3700 VariCam, and AJ-HPX2700 VariCam, as well as recorders like the AJ-HPM110. According to Panasonic documents, AVC-Intra 100 is the highest recording quality available in a one-piece camcorder - comparable to mastering video quality - and is explicitly designed and optimized for broadcast and production. Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 also supports AVC-Intra, so theres no barrier to integrating After Effects with Adobe Premiere Pro projects if you want to use AVC-Intra.

After Effects CS5, like Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, provides full native support for RED R3D files, allowing you to import them directly without transcoding, rewrapping, or installing additional software. Because the files you import contain raw sensor data, you edit footage that is as close to what the camera captured as possible, enabling you to work nondestructively on the color and look of your projects. This includes the ability to edit enhanced parameters such as Debayer Detail, Chroma Denoise, White Balance, ISO settings, and more.

With After Effects CS5, you can work with content in all common RED R3D file permutations, including 2K, 3K, 4K, 4K HD, 16x9, and 2x1, using a number of different frame rates.

Auto-keyframe mode

After Effects has long featured powerful, flexible keyframing. However, artists new to After Effects have expressed a wish for an automatic way to begin keyframing their animations.

To assist these artists, After Effects CS5 offers an Auto-keyframe mode. When Auto-keyframe mode is on, modifying a property automatically turns its stopwatch on and adds a keyframe at the current time. This prevents you from working with a layers properties only to realize later that After Effects did not capture any of your changes. Parameters that can be automatically keyframed include position, rotation, shape properties, mask properties, effect point controls, and camera manipulation.

Top reasons to upgrade to Adobe After Effects CS5

Native 64-bit support - Get the most out of your hardware investment: Native 64-bit support means After Effects can use all available RAM, so its easier to work efficiently on complex HD, 2k, and 4k projects.

Adobe Roto Brush - Isolate moving foreground elements from their backgrounds in a fraction of the time it used to take. Identify foreground and background elements and then let the Roto Brush automatically create transparency for you. Refine edges easily for extremely precise results.

mocha for After Effects - Experience the powerful new capabilities of this popular 2.5D planar tracker, included with After Effects CS5. Masks are now trackable, have variable width feather, and can be applied directly to layers in After Effects using mocha shape.

Dynamic cross-references - Simplify the writing, production, and management of long documents with flexible and powerful cross-references that dynamically update as content is changed or moved within a document.

AVC Intra and enhanced RED support - Work natively with tapeless footage from the newest high-quality Panasonic cameras thanks to AVC-Intra 50 and AVC-Intra 100 support. Work natively with RED R3D formats, and gain additional controls for working with raw footage.

Auto-Keyframe mode - Animate quickly by automatically setting a starting keyframe at the current time.

Dozens of enhancements - Realize productivity gains from dozens of customer-requested refinements. Enhancements include a new Refine Matte effect, the ability to align layers to a compositions boundaries, and importing additional Adobe Photoshop adjustment layer types.

Color lookup table (LUT) support - Easily manage consistent color in your workflow with popular color LUT formats to simulate film and alternate devices or to apply different looks to your footage.

Color Finesse - Enjoy an enhanced color correction workflow with Color Finesse LE 3, included with After Effects CS5. New features include vibrance controls that work in a similar way to those in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom software, hue and saturation curve controls, and highlight recovery.

Digieffects FreeForm - Turn flat objects into virtually any 3D shape using this popular 3D mesh warp plug-in by Digieffects.

Note: After Effects CS5 requires a 64-bit operating system.