The basic premise of CoSA's business plan was to have artists and programmers working side-by-side to produce multimedia content.
CD-ROM production was the first task. Since Macintosh computers were the most advanced multimedia platform at the time, we planned out a system for authoring electronic magazines using Apple's HyperCard and custom plug-ins. Microsoft Word RTF documents with hyperlink information were "flowed" into a multipage, multicolumn layout, with space for in-line advertisements. However, Connections was not a big success.
As we later discovered, its abysmal performance was mainly caused by a certain extremely slow brand of CD-ROM drive we happened to use. PACo enabled platform-independent, low-bandwidth streaming animation playback with synced sound. This new development forced us to change the plan once again. The front-running ideas for CoSA's next big thing were a full-media indexer - similar to full-text indexing and retrieval but with extended capacity for images, sounds, and movies - and some type of animated effects program.
In the end, the animated effects idea looked like it had the most promise. The idea sounded promising, but because of its complexity, CoSA could have gone out of business before being even half-finished. We decided to gut the Lort design, leaving only the most crucial elements in order to ship the product in six months. Otherwise, the team feared, it would have been all over. The next item on Apsara's menu was Egg Roll, so, following the tradition, we named the new product Egg.
Although the name Egg was growing on us, we decided to give the software a real name. However, none stuck like After Effects. The initial release of After Effects was January After Effects 1. With companies like Apple promoting the digital video field, larger software companies became more interested in CoSA and its newly released product. If an effect supports only 8 bpc, and your project is set to 16 bpc or 32 bpc, the Effect Controls panel displays a warning icon next to the effect name.
See Color depth and high dynamic range color. The property group of each effect includes a Compositing Options property group. There is a new Effect Opacity property which provides similar functionality to every effect as the Blend With Original controls. With the Effect Opacity property, you can change the global opacity and it affects the entire effect. There is no need to add a mask separately. The Blend With Original controls group lets you precisely apply any effect to a particular area of an image by masking the desired area.
For more information, see the Blend With Original effect section. The order in which After Effects renders masks, effects, layer styles, and transform properties—called the render order —may affect the final result of an applied effect. By default, effects appear in the Timeline panel and Effect Controls panel in the order in which they were applied. Effects are rendered in order from top to bottom in this list.
To change the order in which effects are rendered, drag the effect name to a new position in the list. See Render order and collapsing transformations. An effect applied to an adjustment layer affects all layers below it in the layer stacking order in the Timeline panel. See Create an adjustment layer. Expression Controls effects do not modify existing layer properties; rather, these effects add layer properties that expressions can refer to.
See Expression Controls effects. Because an effect is applied to a layer, the results of some effects are constrained to within the bounds of the layer, which can make the effect appear to end abruptly. You can apply the Grow Bounds effect to a layer to temporarily extend the layer for calculating the results of other effects. This process is not necessary for newer effects, which tend to be bpc effects.
Paul Tuersley provides a script on the AE Enhancers forum with which you can search compositions for effects and turn them on or off. Paul Tuersley provides a script on the AE Enhancers forum that makes synchronizing changes to Effect properties on multiple layers easier. Some effects—including the Puppet effect, the Paint effect, and the Roto Brush effect—are applied to a layer with a tool, rather than being applied directly in the same manner as other effects.
See Animating with Puppet tools , Paint tools and paint strokes , and Transparency, opacity, and compositing. There is bpc support in all effects, and bpc float support in 35 effects. CycoreFX HD plug-ins have support for motion blur, lights, more controls, and options.
Documentation—including tutorials and example projects—for the Cycore FX CC plug-ins is available on the Cycore website. Mercury effects. Several effects rely on a control layer or layer map as input. These compound effects use the pixel values of the control layer to determine how to affect the pixels of the layer that the effect is applied to the destination layer. Sometimes, the effect uses the brightness values of the pixels in the control layer; in some cases, the effect uses the individual channel values of the pixels in the control layer.
For example, the Displacement Map effect uses the brightness values of a control layer to determine how far to shift pixels of the underlying layer, and in which direction. The Shatter effect can use two control layers—one to customize the shapes of the shattered pieces and one to control when specific parts of the destination layer explode.
The compound effect ignores effects, masks, and transformations of a control layer. To use the results of effects, masks, and transformations on a layer, precompose the layer and use the precomposition layer as the control layer.
It is common to use a control layer that is not itself visible—that is, its Video switch is off. Most compound effects include a Stretch Map To Fit option or a similarly named option , which temporarily stretches or shrinks a control layer to the dimensions of the destination layer.
This provides a pixel in the control layer corresponding to each pixel in the destination layer. If you deselect this option, the calculations for the compound effect are performed as if the control layer is centered on the destination layer at its original size. You can create control layers by drawing or painting in an image-editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop.
For many compound effects, neutral gray pixels in the control layer correspond to null operations. Therefore, a neutral gray solid layer is a good starting point for creating a control layer. Apply the Turbulent Noise effect to a layer and precompose it to create a good control layer for turbulent or atmospheric results.
You can create a control layer by precomposing a white solid layer, a black solid layer, and a mask on the top layer that determines which areas are white and black. Increasing the feather of a mask softens the transition between black and white values. The contrast between adjacent pixel values determines how smoothly the values change across the surface of the control layer. To create smooth changes, paint using a soft or anti-aliased brush, or apply gradients.
Some effects can use the camera and lights within the same composition. Some of these effects always use the composition camera, whereas others include light and camera options in the Effect Controls panel. This effect only appears on a layer when the layer is a 3D object layer from a PSD file.
See 3D object layers from Photoshop. When you apply an effect with a Comp Camera attribute to a 2D layer, the effect can track the camera and light positions within the composition and render a 3D image on the 2D layer that it is applied to.
The results of the effect appear to be three-dimensional; however, the layer with the Comp Camera attribute applied remains a 2D layer and therefore has the following characteristics:. The image is rendered on the layer, not the composition, so make sure that you apply these effects to layers that are the same size as the composition and are exactly centered in the composition.
When you apply an effect to a layer, the Effect Controls panel opens, listing the effect you applied and controls to change the property values for the effect.
You can also work with effects and change most effect property values in the Timeline panel. However, the Effect Controls panel has more convenient controls for many kinds of properties, such as sliders, effect control point buttons, and histograms. The Effect Controls panel is a viewer, which means that you can have Effect Controls panels for multiple layers open at once and can use the viewer menu in the tab of the panel to select layers.
An icon identifies each item in the panel by type. Numbers within the icons for effects indicate whether the effect works on a maximum of 8 bits, 16 bits, or 32 bits per channel. You can scroll through the list of effects and animation presets, or you can search for effects and animation presets by typing any part of the name in the search box at the top of the panel.
Shows effects that work with any color depth, not only the effects that work with the depth of the current project. Show Effects. Show Animation Presets. The panel organizes effects and animation presets according to the option that you select from the panel menu: Categories, Explorer Folders Windows or Finder Folders Mac OS , or Alphabetical.
When you drag an effect or animation preset onto a layer in the Composition panel, the name of the layer under the pointer is shown in the Info panel. If you have not selected a layer, double-clicking an animation preset creates a new layer and applies the preset to the layer.
Double-clicking an effect when no layer is selected does nothing. By default, when you apply an effect to a layer, the effect is active for the duration of the layer. However, you can make an effect start and stop at specific times or make the effect more or less intense over time by using keyframes or expressions or by applying the effect to an adjustment layer.
To see what changes have been made by applying an animation preset to a layer, select the layer and press UU to show modified properties or press U to show properties with keyframes or expressions. Effects that are disabled are not rendered, either for previews or for final output. However, in the Render Queue panel, you can specify that the composition is rendered for final output with all effects on, regardless of which effects are rendered for previews in the Composition panel.
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