QuickStart! - Adobe After Effects CS3 Course

Welcome to the After Effects CS3 QuickStart!!. These movies will help you hit the ground running with After Effects CS3, whether you're a new user or a veteran of After Effects. This movie will describe the exciting new features in After Effects CS3. First, if you haven't used After Effects in the last while, you may notice that the interface looks different between version 6.5 and this version. Instead of several floating windows, now we have one unified window with all the smaller windows within it. Simply choose a workspace, such as standard, animation or all panels and then to customize, drag from the ribbed area over top of where you want your window to land or, if you want a window to be between two windows, choose which part of the window you want it to be on. So I want this one to be between the effects and presets and the timeline, so I drag it down here. To expand a window so it's larger, wait until your mouse looks like a column divider and drag up. To expand any window to fill the entire workspace, use the tilde key, located under your escape key on the keyboard. Whichever window your mouse is hovered over will expand to fill the space. There are new tools in the toolbox in version CS3. The first one is the shape-drawing tool. You can choose from the selected shapes. Here you have your fill and stroke information and click drag to draw a shape. This is a big improvement over what we used to do, which was create a layer, new solid and then draw the shape using our pen tool or this tool, which only had a rectangle and ellipse previously. Now we have this shape that can be animated just like any other layer with the transforms, can add effects to it, etcetera. Using the puppet tool, another new feature in CS3, you can squash or stretch an image or text or animate anything as if it were a character. So I can add pins to my star down at the bottom here and one at the top and then with my black arrow tool, I can click drag to have my star animate. Within the puppet tool we have the puppet starch tool and the puppet overlap tool as well as the pin. The starch tool can be used to stiffen areas of the puppet and the overlap tool can be used to control the depth of elements of the puppet. For instance, if something is overlapping the wrong way from what you want it to, like right now the star's point is going behind the star's arm, I can use this puppet overlap tool on the top of the star and then it won't do that anymore. Now it doesn't overlap the arm. Adaptive motion blur allows for higher image quality of fast objects and faster rendering of slow objects by adjusting motion blur based on the speed of a layer. Individual characters and words can now be used in 3-D space, expanding your text animation pallet. Thirty-two-bit audio tools allows for real-time audio playback so that you can play your audio without having to render and you can send your audio files to Adobe Soundbooth CS3 for sound editing, which automatically updates those audio files in the After Effects project window. In the timeline there is a brainstorm interface. Simply select the property that you wish to brainstorm about and click the brainstorm icon to get options for how your animation and design parameters can be animated based on the properties and effects that you choose. Simply hit play and you can see all the different options that brainstorm is offering you. Adobe Clip Notes allows you to render your work to an Adobe pdf file by going to file, export, Adobe Clip Notes. Here approval notes can be entered and then re-imported into After Effects. When they're imported into After Effects, they show up as markers on the timeline. For more information on the new features in After Effects CS3, consult the After Effects help menu or go to Adobe's website at www.adobe.com.