Is After Effects right for me?

[Jason Mettler]

I love AE! I’m not sure if the big Hollywood studios use it for the big movie stuff but I see tons of commercials and TV shows that use it. After awhile you can recognize a technique or plugin. Just yesterday I saw Zaxwerks 3D flag used in a commercial. So, what I’m saying is get started with AE today – from there, see where you go!

[Michael Szalapski]

It really depends on the kind of special effects work you want to get involved in. AE is a great compositing tool and can be used for rotoscoping, keying, some motion tracking, color correction, object removal, particle effects, and much more. However, you can’t use it to create 3d creatures. You would create those in a 3d program, then use AE to add the dust where their feet fall, composite them into the scene, etc.

Here are some tutorials that use AE in conjuction with a 3d program to create a special effect:

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/meteor_crash_3d_p1/
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/meteor_crash_ae_p2/

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/3d_crater_p1/
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/3d_crater_p2/
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/3d_crater_p3/

Here are some tutorials that use exclusively AE to achieve a special effect:

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/soul_removal/
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/advanced_car_hit/
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/disintegration/

That should give you an idea of how AE can be used in a visual effects workflow.

I know people who use Vegas for audio work, Premiere for editing, and After Effects for compositing. I love the integration between AE and Premiere and I love the new Mercury Playback Engine in Premiere. So I would suggest learning Premiere as well, if you want to use AE.

Before you start with AE though, be aware that it is a very wide AND very deep program. You can’t just start cranking out good work by fiddling around with the program. I don’t think it’s even a good idea to start with following tutorials like the ones I linked above. You should start here: https://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2010/01/getting-started-with-after-eff.html It’s a great set of (free!) resources to begin to build a foundation in AE. A solid foundation is essential to actually doing good work. There’s also this excellent resource: https://www.peachpit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321734866

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Mike Thomas]

Thanks for the replies and thanks especially Michael for all the links! I’m buying the program for sure now. I’m sure I’ll have many more questions down the road! Thanks.