"After Effects is like Photoshop for video."
This is my go-to response when I need to describe to people what I do for a living. Over my twenty years of working in Adobe After Effects, I've tweaked this response countless times, experimenting with terms like visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing – but then I would usually have to explain what those are. Most people are familiar with Photoshop, and while "photoshop for video" is not entirely accurate, it gives the average non-video person an idea of what After Effects does.
Now let's dive deeper. After Effects is a very versatile app from Adobe for creating animations and effects for film or video. You can do simple things like brighten your footage or animate a logo, or you can create and blend advanced visual effects with live-action footage, similar to what you'd see in the latest Marvel movie.
What After Effects is Good At (Seven Common Uses):
Motion Graphics — Also known as motion design, motion graphics involves creating dynamic animations using moving elements such as shapes, text, and graphics. This is widely used in advertising, social media content, and broadcast design (every TV commercial has some form of motion graphics). Motion graphics can range from simple text animations to animated explainer videos to complex, data-driven visuals.
Compositing — Combining multiple visual elements into a single, seamless scene. Compositing requires mastery of a variety of techniques such as blending modes, rotoscoping, color correction, masking, and motion tracking to match graphics or effects to real-world footage. Compositing is essential for merging live-action and digital effects convincingly.
Visual Effects (VFX) — Enhancing footage with effects like explosions, smoke, fire, and particle simulations. This also includes advanced techniques like digital set extensions, object removal, environment replacements, and CGI integration. After Effects has limited built-in capabilities for generating realistic particle simulations, but VFX artists have access to a wide variety of third-party tools and plugins that bring these capabilities to After Effects.
Title & Text Animation — Designing and animating text for cinematic titles, lower thirds, and kinetic typography. After Effects allows precise control over letter-by-letter animation, 3D text, and visual effects like glitching, glowing, and distortion. It’s widely used in film, television, and online content.
Animation — After Effects is commonly used for 2D Animation. Tools like the Puppet Pin tool make it possible to animate characters and objects smoothly, and Parenting layers can be used to rig characters. While After Effects is primarily designed to work with 2D images and graphics, and not 3D models, you can arrange those 2D elements in 3D space to create rich 3D scenes.
Color Correction & Grading – Enhancing and adjusting footage color to match a desired aesthetic. This includes basic exposure fixes, color matching between shots, and stylized looks using LUTs or plugins like Magic Bullet Looks. It’s a crucial step for ensuring consistency in professional video production.
What After Effects is not good at:
Audio & Video Editing — You can do basic editing in After Effects, but it's a cumbersome process, and much slower than a video editing program like Adobe Premiere. I only edit short videos in After Effects, and only if I need access to the built-in effects and tools in AE. The options for audio editing and mixing are especially lacking in After Effects. For audio, your better off with a program like Adobe Audition.
3D Modeling — A common use of After Effects is taking 2D graphics, and arranging them in 3D space to create a 3D scene (technically, a 2.5D scene). When it comes to creating true 3D objects, however, After Effects is useless. It certainly won't be used to animate the next Toy Story movie. However, you can import into After Effects a 3D model made in a 3D program like Cinema 4D. And thanks to Adobe's partnership with Maxon, Cinema 4D comes with After Effects.
Interactive Animations — After Effects excels at creating pre-rendered animations but isn’t designed for building interactive, real-time animations. For web or app-based motion graphics that respond to user input, tools like Adobe Animate are better suited.
Speed — After Effects isn't fast. AE newbies who have some experience with editing programs are often shocked to find that the timeline doesn't play back in real time. And once you start piling on the effects, you can forget about instant previews to check your work.
Conclusion
Adobe After Effects is professional software, with lots of features, and it can be daunting for newcomers. The good news is it's widely used, which means there are thousands of After Effects video tutorials online, showing how to do everything from simple text animations to removing unwanted people from footage to rigging 2D cartoon characters. Another highlight for less experienced After Effects users (or any editor wanting to save time) are AE templates. After Effects templates are project files made by experienced users, that are design to be easy to customize. Most of them feature a short motion graphics animation. Users can simply edit the text, colors, and swap out some of the graphics, then render out a finished, high-quality animation. With hundreds of thousands of AE templates available online, there is a template for pretty much every project. Creation Effects takes After Effects templates to a new level by offering advanced visual effects templates, so users can customize animations of flocks of birds, aurora borealis, or a realistic typewriter animation. Customization is made easy, so even AE novices can create high-quality animations. Visit the Creation Effects website to learn more.
Adobe uses a subscription model for its apps. You can subscribe to After Effects on the Adobe website. Subscribers can cancel at any time.
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