Paid Help – AE Project

[Blaise Douros]

Hey Pete! Welcome to the forum. Generally this is a help and how-to forum, but I don’t think anyone will object if you’re offering some paid work–asking for someone to do your work for free is a much worse offense.

As for your questions: it would probably help if you had some kind of example of the look you’re trying to achieve, or a clip to post along with a description of what you’re trying to accomplish.

Learning AE vs. hiring a pro: What do you have more of–time, or money? If you have endless time, AE is a fantastic tool that will serve you well to know. But: it will take you SERIOUS time to get up to speed well enough to accomplish anything that looks good. I’m not talking days–I’m talking months, maybe years. AE is fabulously complex, made more so by its ability to be customized with javascript expressions. There is no motion designer on the planet who has a comprehensive understanding of AE: some people use it for motion graphics, some people for VFX compositing.

I don’t say any of this to be condescending about your abilities; I have been using AE on and off since version 5 or 6 way back in the early 2000s, and I consider myself only an intermediate user (with decent skillz in certain specific areas) at best. There are people on this forum that outclass me in every way, and I bet every single one of them will tell you that there are areas they don’t know as well.

Now, if you have a deadline and a budget, the answer is simple: hire one of those fine people. There are a lot of them here in this forum, and they will work through your brief in a matter of hours or days, and be done before you can even finish your first tutorial project! If it’s a straightforward enough brief, I might even be your guy 🙂