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Provides: Video effects and manipulation
Developer: Adobe
Minimum Requirements: Multicore Intel processor, Mac OSX 10.4.11; 2 GB RAM, 2.9GB free hard-disk space for installation; plus 2GB of space for optional content; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on a volume that uses a case-sensitive file system or on flash-based storage devices), 1280x900 display resolution with OpenGL 2.0-compatible graphics card, DVD-ROM drive, QuickTime 7.4.5 software required for multimedia features,  Broadband Internet connection required for online services
Cost: $999 full version ($299 upgrade)
Availability: Now

To use Adobe After Effects is to stare into the face of madness. And I mean that in the best way possible.

The simplest way to describe it is as Photoshop for video; you can import it, add special effects, or even use it to create video from scratch. One tutorial I followed allowed me to mock up rolling storm clouds like you’d see on a commercial for a storm report.

But the ability to manipulate video is geometrically more complex than manipulating an image; you can control time, speeding up or slowing down the motion (popular in action movies today, where a character’s furious attack slows down to allow the viewer to savor a brutal hit—After Effects lets you do that). If you’re working with 3D objects, you can control both the objects movement through space, and control the “camera” (the point of view) that moves completely independently—think of it as the Death Star moving towards a planet while an X-Wing (the camera) zooms over its surface. In addition to the raw power to manipulate and create video, After Effects CS4 comes with over 250 effects to do everything from alter the hue/saturation, to knocking out color for a green screen effect, to adding lightning.

So wrap your mind around that, then add to it the idea that, like Photoshop, you can work in layers, manipulating several images, effects, and video files independently, and you’ll begin to understand why this program is so mind-bogglingly powerful, and how—and I’m being completely sincere, here—awe-inspiring that it not only exists, but that it works compfortably on something like my Macbook Pro.

Okay, enough with the genuflecting. What can you use it for? Special effects. Fun things like lightsabers and laser blasts, adding muzzle flashes for gunshots. Playing with text, making letters fly in and out, explode. Teleport, throw fireballs. Pretty much anything you’ve ever seen happen in the opening credits to a movie, After Effects can do. If you can think of an effect, AE can do it with enough rendering time.

One thing After Effects isn’t built to be is an off-line film editing. I mean, you could do it that way, since you can layer different movie files and determine where they begin and end; it just isn’t built for that. It’d be like trying to type a term paper in PowerPoint, technically possible, but there are better tools for that job.  After Effects is primarily for manipulating a movie, so if you have a whole scene built around a showdown, you’d edit the scene in Final Cut or Adobe Premiere, edit in an effect where the hero’s gun flashes, then render that small part out and drop it back in to your completed movie.

All of this, of course, takes a lot of processing power. A “simple” smoke effect, for example, can require your computer to generate tens of thousands of individual particles, then apply a blur effect to make it look like mist. If you want to see what this looks like as you’re playing with the settings, you’re going to want a fast processor and a lot of RAM, which will pre-render as much of the effect as possible. But the truly great thing about AE is that even if you don’t have the latest and greatest multi-core Intel processor, it’s still functional; you just have to have more patience. Because while you won’t be able to view as many complicated effects “live,” you can still queue up the effects you want, get an idea of what they’ll look like by skipping through the footage, and then render them out as a finished movie file. I did this several times on my older white Macbook, and while the lack of a graphics processor and minimal RAM slowed me down, I was still able to produce amazing, professional-looking effects as I learned to use the program.

Speaking of learning the program, this is definitely one where you’ll want the voice of experience to walk you through the basics. As someone who taught himself to use Photoshop and Quark Xpress, I was completely baffled by the After Effects interface: it’s unlike anything you’ve seen before; even other Adobe programs. Fortunately, I was able to take a beginner’s class at a local film school, as well as buying the Classroom in a Box book from Adobe itself to demystify the program. If I’d tried my usual sink-or-swim process, I’d have drowned. That said, once I got the gist of how AE imported footage, dealt with layers, and manipulated effects, it became really simple to arrange them as I wanted.

After Effects CS4 is an insanely powerful tool for manipulating and altering video. At a suggested retail price of $999 it costs as much as the new Final Cut Studio, but you can find it at significant discounts from places like Amazon, and, for people who need professional-level effects, the amount of power that AE CS4 gives you is quite simply staggering for that price. This is not a tool for the iMovie crowd, but if you see your Mac as a computer built around Final Cut, those with a serious interest in filmmaking will be impressed with the amazing toolkit After Effects gives them… once they figure out how to open it.