Stories by: Neil Bennett

The combination of powerful motion and graphics toolsets –- along with a relatively low price –- has made After Effects the most popular compositing software on the market. The CS4 version is still the best application available for high-end motion-graphics work and low- to mid-range visual effects, and the upgrade adds some useful tools -– but it would have been great if Adobe had given it a more fundamental overhaul.

Edius aims to be the plucky little video editor that could. Going up against three major competitors -- Adobe’s Premiere Pro, Apple’s Final Cut Pro, and Avid’s Media Composer -- Edius 5 aims to outperform its rivals and offer a faster and more flexible workflow.

Enlarging images is something every designer and illustrator has to do on a regular basis. From incorporating low-resolution photos or video stills into your page designs to using a high-res image on an even larger poster, there is a whole range of circumstances where you need to use an image larger than its original size without sacrificing quality.

Lightbox Photo is a server-based software tool that allows you to create your own image-sales site. It was originally designed to allow photographers to set up their own stock libraries rather than signing with Corbis or Getty – but it will interest Digital Arts readers who want a quick and easy way to sell their artwork as royalty-free or rights-managed digital files, or as physical art pieces, even in frames.

Shaky footage may be associated with amateur video, but it’s something professionals have to deal with on a regular basis. Whether it’s user-generated footage, something captured on the sly, a quick and dirty shoot or just a momentary case of shaky hands, it’s one of those things that seems minor enough to fix ‘in post’ –- but can take a long time to get right.

Lighting is one of the hardest real-world phenomena to replicate with VFX. The intricate play of photons across surfaces is something five-frames-an-hour 3-D rendering engines have trouble with, so few compositing suites or their plug-ins can do it properly.

Boasting over 180 filters, Boris Continuum Complete (BCC) covers many bases, including traditional image processors, texture and animation generators, and compositional tools covering areas like keying and motion tracking.

The original Asus Eee PC took the hardware world by storm. Small, lightweight, inexpensive, yet running a full-fledged OS, this tiny device offered laptop capabilities at near-PDA pricing. Asus has since expanded its Eee PC line with models of varying capabilities, and competing devices are now arriving from other manufacturers, including Acer, Dell, HP, and MSI, among others. Collectively, these devices have come to be called "netbooks."

Universal Type Server isn't --- as it sounds - a particularly poor Dolph Lungren movie about the perilous journeys of someone who delivers fonts for a living

The Thecus N3200 is a RAID drive that offers good performance at a reasonable price.

The StorCenter Pro 150D is what you expect of a business-focused NAS device: a big boxy chassis that dwarfs its rivals, dull looks, a noisy fan, and support for enterprise-level technologies such as Microsoft's Active Directory.