Adobe After Effects vs. Adobe InDesign vs. QuarkXPress

Adobe After Effects is well suited for creating short video projects that require intricate animation, like 5 minute or 1-minute countdowns, credit roll-ins, outros, and video bumpers. It is also useful for creating animated elements that can be incorporated into video projects, like animated key titles. For longer videos, I would recommend using Adobe Premiere Pro instead.

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Adobe InDesign is very well suited to image-heavy publications, such as children's books, cookbooks and coffee table books. It gives you almost complete control how to arrange these elements, and to be able to tweak them with precision. The software is an absolute necessity if one is developing interactive eBooks, especially for the Apple iTunes store. Unless coded by hand, I am not aware of any other tools to handle this. It is a powerful toolset, and can take on most anything publishing related that you throw at it. I personally have found that it doesn't do too well with reflowable eBooks (like for Kindle Amazon), but it retains that capability.

If you are looking for a great design solution that does not break the bank then QuarkXPress is the way to go. We use Quark not only due to the low cost but, the customer support is amazing and every year you get a new release with updates that you never knew you needed. Quark's development team takes on suggestions and often will implement some of them if the need is great enough. I cannot express the saving of time and money enough when it comes to using QuarkXPress.

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• After Effects is great for creating motion content once and easily exporting it to various formats such as web, broadcast, GIF, etc.
• After Effects is the industry standard for motion graphics. While I’m an Apple user and have used Motion in the past it is not as feature rich and most clients will expect you to use After Effects.
• After Effects is great for complex UI animation. Tools like principle and Flinto are great but are quite cumbersome for complex UI animations.

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• Customization - With Adobe InDesign, as well as many other applications in the Adobe Creative Suite, I can fully customize my workspaces and save different workspaces. This makes it easy to navigate through my project and have the panels and tools I need easily accessible and configured based on my project needs.
• Styles - Adobe InDesign has character styles, object styles, and tables styles. This speeds up my workflows and allows me to easily apply the same format across multiple elements. This is super helpful, especially when working with length documents.
• File compatibility - I can easily export my files into so many different file types.
• The Book feature - This feature is really helpful when creating books or very long documents with multiple sections.

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• Excellent project conversion into PDFs and digital formats.
• Incredibly user friendly and intuitive to use.
• Works seamlessly with our Adobe Suite of programs.

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• I would like the Re-Link file structure to mimic Premiere.
• I would like to see native .obj importing and manipulation.
• I would like to see better audio editing available within Adobe After Effects. if it could be given a separate layer/panel.

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• It would be wonderful if InDesign would do automatic spell- and grammar-checking like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. While it is possible to spell-check your documents, the technology could be improved by being automatic and grammar-checking.
• It can be really frustrating that keyboard shortcuts are different for the same tool between different Adobe products. I wish they would make shared tools the same shortcut. For someone who uses multiple Adobe products, usually in conjunction, it can be hard to remember which program is which keyboard shortcut and not accidentally select the wrong tool.
• While I listed the linked images as being a pro, it can be a con if users don't package their files (especially when working with others on the same file). It would be really helpful if Adobe automatically populated a package file with images assets and typefaces. I can't tell you how many times I have been unable to locate a linked file or had to request them from a colleague.

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• Currently does not have a way to open really old archived QuarkXPress files.
• Text manipulation could be expanded upon (ie be able to warp or distort text).
• Be able to output files in InDesign format.

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I will renew my use of After Effects since it's affordable and always has been reliable. They also always continue to update new features and add new things to compete with other software out there. I also like all the 3rd party plugins out there that keep my interest for the future and new toolsets and creative solutions.

I've had great experiences with the product and plan to continue to use it. It has been my go-to product for designing and creating materials. I have had great luck with it and have been able to create all of the needed marketing materials that have been requested for our company.

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There's a lot of features and functionality that Adobe After Effects offers that can be hard to navigate at times. Depending on the depth you plan to use the software for, that can take some time to learn. The built-in templates and tutorials really help soften that learning curve. Once you get past some of the basics, it's fairly simple to use.

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If you know what you are doing it is an amazingly granular and powerful application. You can control pretty much any aspect of the design and layout of your documents and make changes globally and rapidly. But, if you don't know what you are doing...you will be staring at your screen in bewilderment for a long time. You can learn it, but be ready for a hefty time investment.

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This is an industry standard. It is intuitive and pretty simple. I have been using it for 40 years and by no means do I use its potential, rather it does just what I want it to do.

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I've needed Adobe InDesign team very little which is a bonus in and of itself.

One of the advantages of Adobe InDesign is it is faster and less glitchy than Microsoft Word.

Adobe customer support is wonderful. They genuinely care about their product and the end user experience. The products they create have always been innovative and continue to improve. They have a huge chunk of the user market in their field and still strive to improve. This is such a big deal for me and other small business/organizations that need their products and don't have a large voice on our own.

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Adobe support is ok but not great. Chat support often doesn't initially understand the question at-hand and it takes awhile to get to the right agent. Phone support has long wait times, and though I've had more luck there, it does take quite a time investment if you are looking for help. However, Adobe does have some online learning solutions available as well as a knowledgebase for frequently asked questions. If you're looking to learn how to use the platform, there are lots of resources which can typically be found in a few Google searches. If you have a technical issue with the system, that's going to be a bit more of a time investment as far as getting a tech's assistance to resolve the problem.

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Attending Adobe MAX each year is extremely valuable.

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The online training works well and is not wholly necessary as it is user-friendly and you can learn by doing.

Implementation was smooth and easy.

I've created videos with Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe PhotoShop (with the GIF function), as well as Canva and other online products. Adobe Premiere Pro does not have the same capabilities for creating vector-based content, meaning if that is necessary, Adobe After Effects is superior. The video format functionality of Adobe PhotoShop is more basic and works similarly to Adobe After Effects, so I would choose to use Adobe After Effects over Photoshop for video-making needs because of the increased capability.

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Canva is a valuable design tool for simple applications, such as creating a social media banner, flyer, or leaflet, particularly for those with no prior design experience. Its use of templates and straightforward tools to add pictures and text makes it a good choice for straightforward tasks. However, if you want to create a publication or designs that are more intricate, then InDesign is the tool for you.

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QuarkXPress has more user-friendly features compared to Adobe InDesign where we can set up the page layout for any sort of medium. We can compress the pdf size here as per the requirement. Also, we can export pdf in a quicker manner by choosing it as a default output format.

Working in a cloud environment makes it easy to scale and share resources.

• Adobe After Effects has a great impact on business as maximum work can be done in one software
• To run this software you need to have good configuration system
• Motion Graphics, 2d Animation and video editing can be done in one software

• A great ROI for time in my small architectural practice, [especially] when a design has been updated and a report needs to be submitted. We can be submitting many reports that all look similar, clean and beautiful. We just save as the file and replace the images with more updated images. This way the client finds it easy to navigate updated reports, as many as they can be.

• We've been able to design modern print materials.
• Easy to convert projects from other formats.

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