Adobe Systems has begun production shipments on a Windows nt version of its highly successful and award-winning After Effects 3.1 desktop tool for digital compositing, 2D animation and special effects.

Once thought to be a good compositing tool for lower-end productions like corporate videos, etc., many production houses have discovered that After Effects can be used effectively for more high-end applications like commercials, shorts, and station ids.

We caught up with Justin Stephenson, a director at Cuppa Coffee Animation in Toronto, and James Woollatt, half of Toronto’s re: creations, to see how After Effects is expanding the creative quality of the work they’re doing.

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‘It’s like Photoshop for moving images,’ says Justin Stephenson from a workstation at Cuppa Coffee Animation. ‘I’m a sound byte guy,’ he says with a laugh. Stephenson is referring to their relatively inexpensive Adobe After Effects motion graphics software program.

Since they picked up the system about a year ago, After Effects has allowed Cuppa Coffee to take on some lower budget projects and keep them in-house without sacrificing any of the creativity or polish that can be produced on much more expensive systems like Henry, Flame or Quantel.

‘We’re doing a lot of stuff we couldn’t do before. It allows us to take on some gigs where compositing and layering is involved with lower budgets. In the past it would be $10,000 to go somewhere and composite things on Flame. Now we can take these gigs or say ‘yeah, we can do this at that price’ ­ as long as the rendering time is allowed.’

Originally a physics program, someone figured out that what became After Effects had applications for working with video. Adobe markets the software as ‘a tool for filmmakers, video producers and editors, graphic designers, multimedia professionals and Web developers to produce high-end, unlimited composites, fluid animations and sophisticated special effects.’

James Woollatt at re: creations says they picked up After Effects because ‘it seemed to do the best 2D animation for video on the market ­ basically there wasn’t anything else, even if you’re into Avid suites, they can’t touch the animation.’

re: creations is the brainchild of Woollatt and Chris Kiraly and opened about a year ago. Corporate video has been their meat and potat’es but recently they have been moving more into the commercial market, doing animation for commercials and station ids for Disney.

Layering, matte, animation, key frame, and text types of effects systems used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and had to be done in post shops on high-end edit suites that would still result in a video generation loss.

Now production houses can digitally create unlimited effects layers on film and video for around $3,500 worth of Adobe software plus hardware costs. Cuppa Coffee runs its After Effects program on a Daystar Mac clone that houses four mother boards and runs at about 800 MHz. Woollatt’s hardware at re: creations is ‘a Mac 9500-180mp, which is a multiprocessor, and a Mac 8100-80 with a Radius Video Vision Studio card. Altogether we have about 16 gigabytes of storage space.’

Both Stephenson and Woollatt point to the After Effects final output features as a big selling point. ‘One of the beauties of the system is that you can do D1 output which gives you broadcast quality video with fully interlaced fields,’ says Woollatt.

Upon visiting Stephenson at Cuppa Coffee he was working on a pitch for a tsn station id. His pitch was a near broadcast quality piece that relied heavily on the layering and animation capabilities of After Effects. Combining text from Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop files, film and video, it is a visually rich piece with a wide array of computer and live action images.

‘It’s like working with a toolbox,’ says Stephenson the sound byte guy. ‘I just import everything and drag it into the After Effects. We can do the entire tsn pitch here and have some very slick-looking stuff.’

To produce the tsn logo at the end of the piece, Stephenson says he created the logo in Illustrator, dragged it into After Effects, increased the size and gave it movement with a function called ‘wiggler’ that can create random changes in color, motion, or other effects over time.

After Effects’ ability to easily import files from other Adobe programs is one of the features that both Stephenson and Woollatt appreciate. ‘One of the benefits is its use in conjunction with Adobe Ilustrator, Photoshop and Premier. It’s all supported throughout all those programs so it’s wonderful,’ says Woollatt. ‘I can create a multilayered Photoshop file and if I want to animate it I can import that layered Photoshop file and play with every layer separately. It’s also good for compositing ­ like taking stop-motion animation and compositing live footage.’

Stephenson dem’ed After Effects’ compositing abilities with a piece the shop did for Nickelodeon that added a live-action head to a stop-motion animation body. The Nick short also used After Effects’ shadows and lighting effects.

Stephenson and Woollatt both think the animation on After Effects has a much desired ‘organic’ quality that digital animation often lacks. Stephenson, who comes from an animation stand/motion-control background, says, ‘ae allows you to do a lot of the things we used to do on the animation stand like panning and travelling mattes.’

Woollatt agrees: ‘When you see After Effects animation it d’esn’t necessarily say it was generated on a computer, it’s got a real organic quality, not computery.’

The big drawback with a desktop compositing tool like After Effects is the rendering time. Stephenson says they still send some work out to places like Spin Productions or TOPIX Computer Graphics and Animation because the rendering time would be ‘brutal’ on After Effects. The Windows nt version could improve rendering time but Stephenson says he plans to stay with his Mac.

Woollatt says at re: creations they’re considering switching platforms to help improve rendering time. ‘Probably within the next year we will be considering purchasing an nt machine. With all the filters and layers (you can have thousands in After Effects) rendering can take a long time.