Adobe After Effects
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Adobe After Effects (often just After Effects or AE for short) is a video compositor Adobe part of Adobe's Creative Cloud suite. While technically a video editor, it is more specialized for individual scenes (called compositions), rather than an entire video. It sees heavy use in professional VFX work.
It was created by CoSA in 1993 before being bought by Aldus in the same year, then bought by Adobe in 1994.
It is a very useful tool for tennis as it can create incredibly advanced scenes with relative ease, which can then be saved into another editor without cluttering up the timeline.
Usage
3D Modes
There are various modes of 3D in modern After Effects:
- Classic 3D, the basic 3D renderer. Fast and simple, good for most projects.
- Cinema 4D, which implements the C4D renderer into After Effects. Cinema 4D is needed for specific advanced tasks like extruded text and "bending" layers in 3D space. This is also the only view available when importing C4D files directly into the program. A license for C4D is not required for using C4D mode.
- Advanced 3D, which is in versions 24.0 and higher. Allows for many of the special features possible in the Cinema 4D renderer to be done natively. Also allows for the import of 3D objects into your composition.[1]
In older versions of AE, there was another "rasterized" 3D mode. This worked well with older machines and had some special features, but was a lot slower and eventually removed. [citation needed]
Dynamic Link
See here.
Taking a Screenshot
To screengrab the current preview frame, go to the top bar and select "Composition" -> "Save Frame As..." -> "File...". By default it saves as a photoshop file (*.PSD), however this can be changed to most formats.
Notable Versions
Version histories dating back to 6.5 can be found here.
After Effects 1.0
After Effects 6.5
After Effects CS 5.5
This was the last version to support the old Pixel Bender plugins, however plugins for later versions can restore this functionality.
After Effects CS 6
The final version to be part of the perpetual Creative Suite line of products.
Effects
After Effects comes with tons of different effects, including collaborative plugins with CycoreFX, Cinema 4D and Boris Mocha. The full list can be seen here and obsolete ones can be found here.