Just a few months ago, my office got in a brand new Quad-Core Intel Mac running Snow Leopard. As I excitedly dug in to check out the ramped up performance of my previous version of After Effects, I was disappointed that there really wasn't much difference. I soon discovered the reason was that my previous version of After Effects is a 32-bit program, so I essentially hit a glass ceiling with how far CS3 could take the processors and RAM. Luckily, on April 12th, Adobe released their new 64-bit upgrade with CS5.
Excited to try out several new effects, tools, and features I dug in, albeit a bit skeptical as to how powerful 64-bit really could be.
As to be expected, After Effects CS5 is beautifully designed. The darker default look is just aesthetically pleasing. But lets talk about ease of use. I guess the best way to approach ease of use is to talk about the headliner tool included with CS5: Roto Brush. Roto Brush is a brand-new rotoscoping tool that matches the usability of the auto-select tool featured in Photoshop CS5. Anyone who has been faced with the tedious task of masking out an individual or object will surely be excited to find that Adobe has included a far more powerful and easier tool for the job. Just paint over the part of the image that you want to keep and Roto Brush will assume the edges of the object. What if it messes up? Well, it does a pretty good job auto-selecting, but if it does mess up, just hold down Option and the brush becomes a subtraction tool. You can then just sweep away what you don't want and Roto Brush will find the difference.
The magic of Roto Brush is its propagation feature. That is, After Effects does a great job of guessing the mask for subsequent frames. This feature alone could save hundreds of hours that would have otherwise been spent painstakingly animating masks by hand.
