This is something the manuals won’t show you. Is it useful? Absolutely! But dig under the hood and, using some very interesting techniques, a whole army of moving, synchronized shapes can be created from something that seemed so harmless to begin with. From the large selection of new features that Adobe has infused into After Effects CS3, shape layers are (in my humble opinion) the black sheep of the family – a feature seemingly taken from Photoshop to keep it in the family? Perhaps.
