The kinetic typography assignment was the first time I used After Effects, so it was no surprise to me that there was a steep learning curve. The other Adobe products I have used (Photoshop and Illustrator) are very difficult to master, so this came as no surprise. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. There is always a trade off between simplicity and power when it comes to software, and Adobe products tend to fall on the latter end of the spectrum. This is probably because they are aimed at professionals.
I found After Effects similar to Flash, but there were several differences. Although Flash is owned by Adobe, it was not acquired by them until 2007, so, it did not feel like an Adobe product. The nice thing about Flash is that shapes could easily be morphed together through something called a “shape tween”, which wasn’t available in After Effects. A motion tween could be applied as well for movement. Using these concepts, simple animation was easy. I don’t think I would have been able to create everything that I did in After Effects with Flash though. For example, Flash seemed to lack support for 3D animation.
One of the most frustrating things about After Effects is how resource hungry it is. Often times, my computer would freeze up while using it. Also, when trying to playback animation as I worked, it would not be able to playback at full speed. I think the reason for that is that playback requires After Effects to render the animation as it plays. Since the rendered animation takes up so much memory, my computer isn’t able to fit everything in RAM. Overall, though, I think After Effects would be great to work with as long as my computer were up to specs and I had the proper training.
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