[Erick Wright]

You probably won’t need to buy anything at all – not even a plugin. This is all totally do-able in raw After Effects. There’s two ways. I’d recommend the second, but it involves 3D Layers, which I understand can be a little scary for some After Effects beginners.

1.) Pre-Compose everything, then simply add a Corner Pin Distort (Effects > Distort > Corner Pin) and just keyframe a bit of a zoom, but just adding a keyframe for all 4 points, extending all 4 points, and adding another keyframe. That’s step 1. For the the twist, just animating movement on one side more than the other should work. The transition between them is literally just having around about the same type of movement on both. They’ve got Motion Blur, which really helps concealing cuts. To add motion blur to both the entire composition and that layer, do this.

https://gyazo.com/2a55e734e2dd5766567d7d071959b004

You might have to press F4 to toggle between Switches / Modes. Or you can just press the “Toggle Switches / Modes” button – But who doesn’t love a little bit of efficiency? The default motion blur should do fine, so leave it for now.

The 2nd part of the clip has a little more going on, though. Not only are we doing the corner pin, we’re actually zooming it into 100% of the frame… Meaning that it has to begin as something less than 100% of the frame. This would mean that the video would be smaller in the frame, and surrounded by the black void, or whatever happens to be underneath that layer. To counter that, you can either start at 100% and end with a zoomed in version, which isn’t something you’d want.

Or you can use Motion Tile (Effects > Stylize > Motion Tile) – Which will extend the edges of your video to a certain amount. Increase the Output Width and Height so that the video extends far enough to cover the composition, and then tick Mirror Edges. Mirror Edges, plus the motion blur will pretty much hide our little cheat. I mean, without going over frame by frame in the original video, you probably missed it on the original, ay?

https://gyazo.com/e878a8c69ad0b02f0dac5f5c842b1383

That kaleidoscope effect is what we’re doing here as well… Then it’s just a matter of animating the movement so it ends with the corner pins being the same as the original dimensions of the composition, and we’re in.

The rest of the transitions are just different animated distortions that all use Motion Tile to extend the frame.

If you don’t like that and would prefer the 3D layer one, I’ll absolutely post that too.

[Erick Wright]

In what order do you have the effects? Could you list them in the order they’re listed in AE? Also could we get an animated render of what you have so far?

Just from where it looks right now you’re pretty close to the effect. Well done! What the original effect has is more of a concentrated blobby particle effect, of perhaps half the size you have, and then a 2nd version, half-transparency, blurred effect either behind or masked with a Linear Light blending mode.

[Erick Wright]

What Dave said.

Your best set up would be:

Operating System on one Solid State Drive, After Effects being on that is perfectly fine and won’t affect performance
A Cache on a separate Solid State Drive
Your final renders on a 3rd and final.

Generally though having it all on one SSD (if that’s all you have) is better than having all 3 on 3 different HDDs.

I’d also recommend if possible having the footage on an SSD, and as you render rendering to an SSD and then later moving it to a HDD (because of course most people won’t really have the space in a typically-sized SSD)

If you have a few TBs of SSD, then more power to you.