After Effects

What is After Effects?

After Effects is a digital compositing and motion graphics application from Adobe. You build a project out of compositions, which are like little timelines where you stack layers of footage, images, text and shapes, then animate those layers with keyframes. Anything you can imagine moving on screen, from a bouncing logo to a full greenscreen composite, starts as a stack of layers and a set of keyframes.

The app first shipped in 1993, when it was created by a small company called Company of Science and Art, and Adobe acquired it shortly after. Three decades later it is still the tool of choice for motion graphics and for finishing shots that need a little magic, and it is a core part of Creative Cloud alongside Premiere Pro, Photoshop and Illustrator.

What makes it special is the combination of depth and reach. It has professional-grade tools like the 3D camera tracker, rotoscoping brushes and dozens of keying effects, yet a total beginner can open it, drop in a clip, and animate a title in their first hour. Add the enormous ecosystem of plugins, presets and free templates, and you have a tool that scales from hobbyist YouTube intros to blockbuster title sequences.

Key Features

• Layer-based compositing with a keyframe timeline and graph editor
• Motion tracking, planar tracking and a 3D camera tracker for matchmoving
• Keylight and other keying tools for greenscreen and bluescreen work
• Roto Brush for cutting out moving subjects without manual masks
• Expressions: JavaScript-like snippets that drive animations procedurally
• Content-Aware Fill that removes unwanted objects from footage
• Scene Edit Detection that splits clips automatically at cuts
• Motion Graphics Templates (MOGRT) that work directly inside Premiere Pro

How to get started

After Effects is installed through the Creative Cloud desktop app, which handles updates for you. Adobe offers a free trial, and students and teachers get heavily discounted plans, so getting the software on your machine is the easy part.

Once it is running, create a new composition, import a video or an image, and start playing. The fastest way to learn is the official tutorials on Adobe's site, which walk you through animating text, tracking footage and exporting a finished render. Exporting is handled by Adobe Media Encoder, which gives you presets for YouTube, social media and broadcast.

• Install After Effects from the Creative Cloud app
• Create a composition and import footage or images
• Add layers and animate them with keyframes
• Follow Adobe's starter tutorials for text animation and tracking
• Export your render through Adobe Media Encoder

Use cases

• Motion graphics for social media, intros and lower thirds
• Film and TV title sequences and credit rolls
• Greenscreen compositing for video creators
• UI and app animation mockups for product teams
• VFX cleanup: removing rigs, wires and unwanted objects
• Product promos and animated advertisements

Pricing and licensing

After Effects is sold as a subscription. You can pay for it as a single app, or get it as part of the Creative Cloud All Apps plan, which also includes Premiere Pro, Photoshop and the rest of Adobe's suite. There is no perpetual license anymore; the last buy-once version was CS6, way back in 2012.

Subscriptions include every update while they are active, which is nice given how often Adobe ships new features. Students and teachers get a steep discount, and the free trial gives you seven days of full access. Exact prices change, so check the Adobe website for the current figures.

Pros and cons

The strengths are hard to overstate: After Effects is the industry standard, which means tutorials, plugins, templates and freelancers are everywhere. The Creative Cloud integration is seamless, expressions give you real programmatic power, and the feature set keeps growing every year.

The main drawbacks are the subscription model, which many hobbyists dislike, and the learning curve. The keyframe workflow is easy to start but takes real practice to master, and complex compositions can make previews slow unless you invest in a good machine. It is also a 2.5D tool at heart; for true 3D work you would pair it with a 3D app like Blender or Cinema 4D.

Alternatives

• Nuke: node-based compositing used for high-end film VFX
• DaVinci Resolve Fusion: free node-based compositor built into Resolve
• Apple Motion: cheaper motion graphics app for macOS
• HitFilm: free compositor aimed at indie filmmakers
• Natron: open-source node-based compositor