After Effects CS4 – 1st Impression

Installed a trial version of AE CS4 tonight. After playing around and making a little comp with a sharks fine gliding through some water; with added particle systems for water foam etc.

I notice that the main interface is very similar to CS3, although I am sure there’s some news to explore once I get time to look into the new features. I don’t see a lot of new stuff, but I can already see they added a search field in the timeline panel, which is good.

Apparently they have also integrated some tools to preview your video cell phones. It would be interesting to learn more about performance improvements.

I played around with the new Cartoon filter, I found it fun to play with; but wouldn’t really say that it’s very useful. I’m sure the same effects could be achieved by a combination of existing filters. Anyway could be useful for some quick cartoony look if you ever needed that.

I worked on my little test project with the shark fin for 3 hours tonight, so I did have time to try out some various rendering output module settings as well; and I noticed some new formats there as well. Will post here what I find when I continue exploring AE CS4.

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