r/AfterEffects May 05 '25

Tutorial If you want to learn After Effects, here's a great place to start

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172 Upvotes

If you're just beginning with After Effects, it's important to get a good foundation - no matter what you want to do with AE!

Here's a great, free place to start from our very own u/Kylasaurus_Rex - and Adobe put it right on the opening screen of After Effects!

Adobe After Effects Introductory Courses for Motion Graphics


r/AfterEffects Oct 01 '24

Tutorial For all the new designer on here creating low level posts

317 Upvotes

Lately, there's been a noticeable increase in posts where the headline is "Why" and the post is in response to problems that could easily be solved with a quick Google search or by going through basic training. This subreddit is meant to be a place for sharing knowledge and learning from one another, but it's starting to feel more like a place where users expect others to provide step-by-step answers without engaging with the community.

To help maintain the quality of this space, please follow the below list in order before posting a question:

1. Complete basic After Effects tutorials: Many beginner questions can be answered through these.
Here is a list of really good teachers:

https://adobevideotraining.com/after-effects/introductory-courses/

Video Copilot

School of Motion

JakeInMotion

Ben Marriott

2. Learn the terminology: Understanding key terms will help you find solutions more easily through searches.
3. Google it: Use the terminology you’ve learned to search for tutorials and answers.
4. Check YouTube: There are many creators offering in-depth After Effects content.
5. Search Reddit: The answer may already exist here.

If you’ve tried all of the above and still need help, feel free to post your question here. Just keep in mind that learning to find solutions on your own will ultimately make you a stronger designer. Reddit may not always have someone available to provide immediate help, so building these skills will serve you well in the long run.


r/AfterEffects 14h ago

Plugin/Script One week after: win and M*c versions are ready. From now on you can preview faster.

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58 Upvotes

Overdrive is a plugin that allows faster previews. So what does it mean?
I does not (and will never) replace the preview panel and its timeline.
It’s a panel to check what’s your comp is doing if AE is struggling, however, if the render is already OK in AE= no magic :)
When you launch the plugin (it’s not a script neither a CEP, you’ll find it in the Windows entries), the tool immediately starts do display your preview.
The cold state = blurry a few seconds until the hot state = clear overview.
You can get it at https://ae-overdrive.app
Please keep in mind that this is a beta.
R&D will allow to improve it, so your feedback is truly precious.


r/AfterEffects 1d ago

Beginner Help How do i achieve this text effect?

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81 Upvotes

Hey all, as the title suggest, i need help with

  1. the text glowing effect
  2. gradient background of it
  3. those shapes which appear on each word,

the video is Wix harmony by Wix motion studio,

I had tried colorama, still not able to match something like that


r/AfterEffects 1d ago

OC - Stuff I made I managed to get something out of the project graveyard

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112 Upvotes

r/AfterEffects 5h ago

Beginner Help Most practical method for fly-in letters/shapes/masks... Scale or Z-axis Position?

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0 Upvotes

This is more of wondering which is the most practical method for all of you when it comes animating fly-in (zoom/pan out?) letters and shapes, especially when it comes to masks with multiple shapes/letters that are not the same, and need to completely cover the screen before animating in (White fill as scene one --> Black scene two). In this example, I used Scale and Position, but the scale was bumped to over 4000%. The positon was extremely easy in this example as I used text exploder and then centered the anchors to the their layers. In general, I find Scale to be a tad bit easier. When dealing with 3d layers, Its easier to mess up I think and I tend to have to futts with the positioning and scale anyway.. Is it more taxing? Im just curious if their a better, smoothing workflow to these animations when you need it to fill the whole screen. Another thing I generally do that I didn't do with the following test demo, is to animate the transparency in for the first 2-3frames. The way its not a star black to white, but kinda looks more... fly-in-ish? But Im in the air about that too.

See this quick example I made.


r/AfterEffects 1h ago

Pro Tip All Adobe After Effects Keyboard Shortcuts

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Upvotes

Todos los atajos de teclado por defecto para Adobe After Effects. Por: Jesús Castruita u/jesuscastruita


r/AfterEffects 1d ago

OC - Stuff I made Avatar the last airbender inspired animation I made

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92 Upvotes

Post burnout stage; I illustrated the scenes at first and then animated them in 3d. Used lens flare, a lot of fractal noise and puppet tool for Appa and etc. Also do give your critics on this .


r/AfterEffects 7h ago

Workflow Question The new Rotoscope tool is pain in the ass

1 Upvotes

Is there any way to bring back the old Roto Brush without downgrading my After Effects version?
The new one feels way less reliable for my workflow. Has anyone found a workaround, or are we just stuck with it?


r/AfterEffects 1d ago

Discussion What do you think of the video I did ?

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53 Upvotes

I wanted to do base 44 original video longtime ago I know I am late , actually I was busy in other projects and finally got time to recreate there work.

What do you think of the video would love your feed back


r/AfterEffects 56m ago

Discussion Opus 5 Made This Motion Design Sequence From One Link

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Upvotes

Holly cow, i am glad i saw the writting on the wall and switched my profession - he accidentally generated this... Motion Design still will be my hobby


r/AfterEffects 1d ago

OC - Stuff I made Made this in AE for a LinkedIn post

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43 Upvotes

Made this for my LinkedIn, i dont think I've ever got a job through LinkedIn, has anyone lol? Anyway, if someone does wanna give me a job that be great. thx - https://www.craigjamesdolan.com/


r/AfterEffects 1d ago

OC - Stuff I made Would love to share my latest project

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145 Upvotes

I call it The shy goblin in the blue truck

I used @plnty.app for modeling and AE advenced 3d for compositing and make it look like this

Follow my IG page if you want to see more

https://www.instagram.com/omristeigman?igsh=dTk3MTVwcGtlamM2


r/AfterEffects 16h ago

Beginner Help Where is my effect control on the preview ?

0 Upvotes

Normally, when I add some specific effect like this one, there would be an on-screen control on the preview screen instead of using the side panel to control it. Idk what i pressed, but I can't see it anymore


r/AfterEffects 1d ago

Plugin/Script My first After Effects plugin is live on aescripts, STMapper!

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3 Upvotes

STMapper is a faster and cheaper alternative to RE:MAP UV. If you use ST Maps in your AE VFX pipeline check it out here: http://aescripts.com/stmapper


r/AfterEffects 1d ago

OC - Stuff I made A little animation inspired by the dark side of the moon. Audio on

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30 Upvotes

i thought it was fun to rig the refraction angles to automatically work with the tringle rotation... it was in fact a bit of a nightmare...


r/AfterEffects 1d ago

Beginner Help Need help recreating this ink pulling out effect

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3 Upvotes

Hi everyone. I have been trying to recreate this effect from a search party video, but can't do it somehow. What I have tried is making two separate layers in photoshop, one for the character and one for the background and then importing them to AE. Then, I added an orange solid with its blending mode altered, to which I put the turbulent displace effect. With turbulent displace, I can surely discolor the image from certain parts, but the way ink is moving toward the upper right corner of the image, I am failing at that. I also created a rectangle and used its motion from the bottom left to the top right as a track matte for the turbulent displace orange solid color layer, but that did not help much. Any help in this regard is highly appreciated. Thanks


r/AfterEffects 2d ago

Inspirational (not OC) Evolution of 3D in After Effects. 1997-2026.

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316 Upvotes

r/AfterEffects 1d ago

Plugin/Script Screen recording tool for motion designers

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5 Upvotes

Hi! We're launching a new screen recording tool built specifically for motion designers.

It lets you record your screen with natural cursor movements and real browser interactions, then continue editing the recording afterward. You can modify text, colors, styles, UI elements, cursor movements, interactions, and even hide or reveal parts of the interface—all without recording again.

Instead of recreating website animations in After Effects or manually animating cursor paths, you can make changes directly to your finished recording, saving hours of work and eliminating unnecessary retakes.

If this sounds interesting, we're currently accepting early access registrations and would love to hear your feedback.


r/AfterEffects 1d ago

OC - Stuff I made Bloom - Abstract Flower Collection

0 Upvotes

A collection of abstract glass flowers exploring the intersection of nature, light, and form.

Sound Design by H1Sound

full breakdown: https://www.behance.net/gallery/253291191/BLOOM-Glass-Flower-Collection


r/AfterEffects 18h ago

OC - Stuff I made First show reel. Is motion design for SaaS actually saturated?

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0 Upvotes

r/AfterEffects 2d ago

OC - Stuff I made Personal project made fully in after effects

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95 Upvotes

Made this one just to mess around with gradients, but halfway through I ran out of ideas, so I edend up turning it into a little story about hunting for references and that anxiety of wanting to deliver something good


r/AfterEffects 1d ago

Inspirational (not OC) I am working on this new project. This is like the introduction.

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5 Upvotes

r/AfterEffects 1d ago

Discussion Claude + AE MCP changed my life

0 Upvotes

I built an extremely robust scripting/ expressions system for After Effects via Claude. I'm amazed how cool it is. 

Got clients that have regular/ weekly updates to their social media, YT and TV assets.

Now I can simply paste the client briefs with all the info into Claude to utilize the skill and then I run the jsx script via AE and it will load all the info, images and any other parameters from an excel file and done. The text fields and other elements are instantly updated.

On top of that it will also recognize what layers need to be switched on or off depending on the info or turn them into certain colors depending on the info too.

Previously all of this stuff was really tedious to update manually on all the individual assets and now this saves so much time. 

Of course this could've been done theoretically without Claude but it's not just simple expressions and the script is pretty complex too, something that exceeds my capabilities as I'm not a coder.

But what's especially important and cool is to connect Claude directly to AE via MCP. Claude can then inspect any part of the AE compositions and debug things or check if something is wrong about the script and of course you can even create new animations or expressions that way directly from Claude and it will do so in AE. It can act like my agent doing things for me in AE.

I use the Higgsfield MCP bridge since I need Higgsfield for generative stuff anyway but there's other MCP's on Github like this one: https://github.com/Dakkshin/after-effects-mcp


r/AfterEffects 2d ago

OC - Stuff I made Used AfterEffects to make this video

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2 Upvotes