After Effects 5.5 Plug-In Power Pack due next month

Adobe has announced a new Plug-In Power Pack for Adobe After Effects 5.5, their tool for motion graphics and visual effects. The After Effects 5.5 Plug-In Power Pack, which supports Mac OS X, incorporates 16 new effects and introduces Advanced Windows Media support.

The After Effects 5.5 Plug-In Power Pack works with Adobe After Effects 5.5 software to produce motion graphics and visual effects for film, video, multimedia, and the Web. The new Windows Media output module provides a set of controls to create Windows Media streaming video content. You can customize settings, embed metadata, create multi-stream movies, and independently optimize audio and video.

The Power Pack includes additions such as the new Calculations plug-in, 3D Glasses, Magnify and Turbulent Displacement. 3D Glasses combine left and right 3D views for stereoscopic viewing. Magnify can scale part of an image, or the entire image beyond 100 percent while maintaining resolution. Turbulent Displacement uses fractal noise to create turbulent distortions such as flowing water, funhouse mirrors, and waving flags. The Calculations plug-in is similar to the Calculations command in Photoshop, but allows the same flexibility as other effects in After Effects, according to Adobe. Calculations can often replace multiple instances of Shift Channels, Compound Arithmetic and pre-composing.

The Power Pack also includes new ways to handle color. Paint Bucket is a “non-destructive” paint tool that fills a selected area with solid color. Channel Combiner lets you extract and view channels in a variety of ways. Moving shapes and colors between layers has also been simplified, according to Adobe. Color Link colorizes one layer with the average pixel values of another layer. Eyedropper Fill lets users choose a solid color on the original layer, or a color value from another layer, and apply it to a second layer.

What’s more, the Power Pack also includes several new ways to handle noise and shadows. Noise Alpha adds various types of uniform or squared noise to the alpha channel of a source layer. Noise HLS simulates film grain or adds noise to still or moving footage. Radial Shadow creates a shadow from a point light source over the layer it’s applied to, rather than from an infinite light source.

The After Effects 5.5 Plug-In Power Pack is expected to ship in the US, Canada, and some European countries next month and will be available for download from the online Adobe Store for US$25.