After Effects with AI

[Graham Quince]

Depends what you mean by AI, I suppose. These days I take it to mean image generation, but I think you’re actually referring to tools like Content Aware Fill.

• I think some intuitive tools like drawing a shape and then having that shape formed by smoke would be brilliant.
• Easier morphing now that we have face tracking. 3D head tracking would be good too. In fact, 3D body tracking.
• Anything around landscape generation and water simulation.
• Extending an image would be good. I’m always wishing I had a bit more of a background plate. Especially after you’ve stablized an image.
• Camera tracking is great, but imagine if AE could also automatically create lights from a 3D tracked scene.

[Sergio Cabrera]

Do you really think Adobe AE dev team will include some AI tools in the next release? They have been really lazy to add features extremely requested by users… I think this may be a problem, because there are two possible options:

1) Adobe After Effects includes AI tools, and take advantage or this technology.
2) Adobe After Effects dies against some new tool that creates the same effects by just typing some prompts.

I’m not gonna lie, I’m a bit worried. Graphic designers can feel the impact of AI right now, imagine in one year or two…

[Sébastien Lavoie]

Love this topic. I’m a motion designer too, and I hit the same pain points you described. I didn’t want to wait on adobe so I built and extension to use multiple generative ai models directly inside after effects.

It’s called Ziframe (https://ziframe.com). I built it for myself to address some of the pain points of using ai and working in after effects :

– Constant context switching between Ae and the browser

– The very tedious flow of Generating an image with ai → downloading file → moving file to project folder → importing file to Ae → moving it to the timeline → making adjustments with After → Exporting the image → Opening a video generation tool to make it move → etc.

– Juggling between so many tools and subscriptions

quick demo: https://youtu.be/82mRQL1_J0M

The idea of Ziframe is having a clean extension inside of After Effects to use multiple image and videos models to generate, edit, upscale and extend assets.

It takes your input, produces the image / videos for some credits and then saves the assets on your disk near your project, imports it into a new Ae composition. You can also create multiple things at the same time with the built-in queue.

That’s it. Just a simple tool to stay in the flow. I hope this can help other people and improve your workflow as well. It’s still in early development, and I’d be happy to get feedback on it.

[John Martin]

all the things you listed are already doable perfectly in a free local software called Comfyui, but you need a 5090 to use it fast, ai is extremely heavy when you need quality and speed at the same time. Adobe is going throught a dark period, with Davinci and Capcut having surpassed it by almost 200% in google researches, it only remains afloat because it’s the most “experienced” software compared to the others, by at least a decade.

The only way i see AE returning the absolute best is to immediately reinsert a permanent license solution, people like to pay once and keep the software and only repay when they need that super new cool feature in the new versions.

Secondly, yes, by integrating some of the inpainting-outpainting-morphing-autokey-autotrack features they already integrated in photoshop and premiere. AE is still the king for the way is designed, but currently it’s kind of overlooked and we keep using it just because we’re too used to his unique workflow, or because we cling to the hope that Adobe will wake up. we’ll see.

[Sébastien Lavoie]

Ai tools can indeed run locally with comfyUI, although this is more complex to setup and requires a lot of expensive hardware to run smoothly. Ziframe is not running locally. It’s more similar to options like freepik, replicate, etc. But the main idea here is to bring things *inside* of After Effects instead of having another tool open in your browser. If you’re doing your work in After Effects, avoiding the constant context switching improves the flow of work.

Regarding the position of After Effects versus its competition and its licensing type, it’s another conversation, but personally, I love Ae and don’t mind paying monthly for it. It’s powerful, extensible, and works well for me. Other tools have their uses too, and I’m glad there are many options.