mix & match.(Product Information)

A PLETHORA OF PLUG-INS ADDS POWER TO AFTER EFFECTS

Of all the effects and motion graphics software on the market today, After Effects is arguably the most popular. Developed by CoSA, purchased by Aldus, and acquired by Adobe Systems in 1994, After Effects boasts an installed user base of more than 100,000. Most visual-effects facilities both large and small rely on the software's compositing, animation, and effects features on a daily basis.

One of the reasons that After Effects has enjoyed such widespread adoption is its comprehensive suite of core tools that meets the needs of most Mac- and Windows-based 2D and 3D visual-effects artists designing for film, video, multimedia, and the Web. Another reason is that over the years, a large and varied selection of third-party plug-ins has been developed for use with the program.

"We've been using After Effects plug-ins since they first became available," says Mike Goedecke, lead creative and partner at Belief (Santa Monica, CA), a creative content studio specializing in broadcast design and live action. "We use plug-ins every day, in all our projects, because they help us give a distinctive visual style to our work. There's such a variety of them available that there's almost no limit to what you can do inside After Effects."

According to After Effects senior product manager Steve Kilisky, more than 20 vendors are shipping close to four dozen After Effects plug-in packages; most comprise numerous individual plug-ins (also called filters), making the total number of plug-ins difficult to count. All of them enable users to automate or customize their workflow, add professional effects to their projects, or simply work more efficiently.

Designed for Extensibility

According to Kilisky, so many plug-ins are available for After Effects because the software--like Adobe's other products, including Premiere, Photoshop, and Illustrator--is &signed to be extensible. "Our philosophy is to think of After Effects as a compositing environment that we've opened up to third-party developers who can add on to that environment as customers' needs change," he says. "In some cases, we don't have the expertise in-house to incorporate into After Effects all the features that our customers tell us they want. So instead, with each release of After Effects, we open that environment even further to allow third parties to write plug-ins that add the functionality our customers are asking for."