The After Effects Puzzle.

So I spent the weekend tinkering with Adobe's After Effects CS3 and having a bloody good laugh doing it.

So I like it, right? Well yeah, but bugger me with a fishfork if I can see what it's for. See, at it's most basic level it's a bit like animated Photoshop: easy to use, quick results but a bit limited and heavily reliant on gimmicky plugins. On a more advanced level it's got a slightly irritating scripting function and some interesting but fiddly ways to build up complex effects which can create some genuinely good visuals but are really quite finnicky to get working.

So here's the problem: if you're still at the stage of wrestling a bit with Photoshop, most of After Effects' worthwhile abilities will be well and truly out of reach. But then if you're advanced enough to quickly get to grips with the annoying scripting and linking, you're probably already using something really powerful like Autodesk's astonishing Maya, which wipes the floor with After Effects in almost every respect I can see, urinates on its shoes, pleasures its wife and flies away laughing.

Maybe I can learn to love it as I use it a bit more. But it's going to have to come up with a really incredible party piece to stop me from leaving with Maya at the end of the party.

Thanks to Adobe for the free trial!