Should I?

D

dstevens

Well-known member
This is a terrible question even as I ask it....

I'm weighing the pros and cons of getting AE. I have Adobe's other products, Premiere Pro, Encore and Audition. I'm trying to figure out what I can do in AE that I can't do in Premiere Pro or Audition. My first thought was I didn't need it, I want to do character-driven pieces, not Star Wars III. But then I've seen people on this board discuss cool little effects that would make a movie visually interesting.

I also have some ideas for a dance film where I might need it. Here's the scene: A dancer is dancing in 'mid air', with a blue sky background, maybe with clouds in the background. Another layer would be an unborn baby faintly seen in the background.

Tinkering around it seems Premiere Pro can do a lot with color keys, opacity, etc.

Does the scene above sound like possible in Premiere Pro? Or would I need something like AE?

Sort of a silly question, I suppose.... So fire away!
 
..you can definitely so it in PPRO. AE is a compositor and more of an effects package. PPRO will run most of the plugins right within PPRO that AE has if you have AE , but for the most part.. standard PPRO will do any key or basic composite you want. when you want to do something more complex, or in "3D".. AE is the way to go. if i were you though i would just buy the whole video bundle. youll likely want to use AE sooner or later.
 
Not a silly question at all. Premiere allows you to do certain amounts of compositing, and color correction and whatnot, but think of After Effects as Photoshop for video. Also, if you want to do ANY kind of motion grapics, advanced video manipulation, or special effects Premiere will not help you.

Not to mention, as iamloser pointed out, the 3D layers and what can be accommplished with them is a very valuable tool, not to mention the warps, and other cool things like tracking and the Wiggler.
 
I agree with the last comment. I also think that if you are serious about doing things like that, you may want to investigate 3rd party plugs for AE. I've found some of their built in features are not the greatest especially for keying. Good luck.
 
Keying is good in AE but the particulars are not. so if you buy an AE you will need to buy some plugins sooner or later. but why don't you try a demo?
 
After Effects is "ok". Don't invest any money into it until you try the demo and see what you think. The program is not that intuitive compared to others, but once you get the hang of it you can do general 2d effects and some basic compositing. For most people this is all they will ever need. It is also a very very very slow rendering machine (unless you have a farm of pcs going) and you may want to pimp your computer out as much as possible. Ciao.
 
I have to disagree with the previous post. The interface for After Effects is showing its age, although the guys who originally wrote the app years ago have been continually refining it. I believe that After Effects is the swiss army knife of multimedia with its only failing being in the audio department. My guess is that the person who posted the previous message does not have extensive experience with the application and is therefore somewhat "down" on it.

I have just finished up an advanced tutorial for After Effects, which you can view for free (at least the first three chapters) at The Virtual Training Company (www.vtc.com). I absolutely adore After Effects and have yet to mine all its depths.

Nathan Dickson
 
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