After Effects 6.5: powerful, creative motion graphic tool

As a designer, I am heavily involved in graphic arts, technology, and digital media. Most of my work and experience, however, has been within a two-dimensional space, so my dive into the world of motion graphics has been an new experience. My experience with Flash provided an adequate concept of time, but the newly added dimension of space or depth has taken some stretching of the mind. This adventure has been very exciting however providing me with new opportunities to express myself and communicate my ideas.
Being an Adobe product, After Effect’s user-interface elements were instantly familiar. Navigating through the application was for the most part simple and pleasing. The overall appearance of the interface however, including tool palettes and dialogue boxes, does seem to be slightly behind the other Adobe products. Although it is obvious that a good deal of research and design has gone into accessibility and usability of the interface, a few items such as docking and collapsing pallets could assist in organizing the workspace more effectively.

The layers window is the area where all of the action takes place in After Effects. This was a little overwhelming at first, but familiarization with the window comes quickly and before long, it becomes an easy-to-use and powerful means for composing and navigating your project. As stated earlier, it is obvious that a good deal of thought has gone into designing the application in a way that power users can compose and edit their projects as quickly and effectively as possible. A simple example of this is the ability to click directly on a value and then drag horizontally to increase or decrease its value. In most other applications, you would have to edit the value in a remote dialogue window.

As a beginning user of After Effects and motion application in general, my review will not cover any of the advanced or necessarily new features of the application. I will, however, provide my impressions, experience, and favorite features. Generally, I feel that the application is solid. It is well-composed and very powerful. I was impressed at how many features and options it contained. As stated above, the interface can still use some refinements to make it more intuitive, but it gets the job done well.

Something that really impressed me was the ability to import Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop files with all of their layers. This is a very powerful feature, as it saves you a lot of time by allowing you to design and import all of your artwork, including transparent and translucent elements, in one step.

My favorite feature however is the concept of parenting. This is amazing and very powerful. It allows you to assign an element on a layer to another element, causing the first to move with the parent. The big thing is that you can create an unlimited scope of hierarchy where elements are effected by grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on.

All-in-all, I was impressed. The application was much more robust than I expected. I would recommend After Effects to anyone interested in venturing into motion graphics.