What is After Effects for? - After Effects Tutorial

- Maybe the most common question and one that can be surprisingly difficult to answer is the question of what After Effects does. In fact, it overlaps with a number of other tools that do similar things from Premiere Pro to Photoshop and beyond. Sometimes those other tools are more specialized for given tasks than After Effects, so in this lesson, we'll try to draw some simple boundaries. The most common questions I get about After Effects are as follows. Is it a video editing application? Is it kind of like Photoshop but for moving images? Is After Effects used for 3D animation? Is there a correspondence between designing in Adobe Illustrator or InDesign and in After Effects? Since it's helpful to have an idea about this before ever getting started, let's take a look at these questions one by one. To respond first to the question, is After Effects used for video editing, I'm here in Adobe Premiere Pro, and I have open a roughly three-minute long edit from Ashley Kennedy's "Premiere Pro Essentials" course on this same site. Now, you can see some things in common with After Effects here. There's a project panel. There are effect controls. There is a viewer, but I want to focus you on the timeline down here, which just has a very few tracks. As soon as I press play, playback starts immediately, no rendering required, and if I zoom in, I can see that just these couple of video tracks and these few audio tracks have many dozens of shots in them, which you see playing up here in the viewer. And if you really look closely, you can see these little colorful effects tags on the individual clips. So each individual clip can be opened up here in the reference monitor, and the effect controls and keyframe interface are found over here, as well. Here, believe it or not, is that exact same edit imported into After Effects. Before I press play, I'm going to bring up the timeline full screen, and you'll see that there are a lot more layers. And that's because each layer can only contain a single shot, so as they're stacked up, and arrayed through time, you can see there are over 100 layers in here. I'll press play, and you'll notice that playback is not quite immediate. It's doing its best, but it's not quite there. It needs to create a RAM cache. And finally, the effect controls are found by just twirling down the layer, or for that individual layer, I can also go up here to the effect controls panel. The keyframe timeline isn't in the effect controls panel, but rather, right below the layer. Now, we're in Photoshop, an application I think most of viewers will be, at least, somewhat familiar with. And we're looking at an image from Deke McLelland's excellent Photoshop "One-on-One Mastery" course. There are seven layers in this image, which I can solo individually. I can also notice the rainbow has a linear blending mode on it, and that there are some layered groups which I can twirl down and look at the contents. I can also solo them to see just the car and its shadow. And if I make changes to the file, I am saving it, so if I save it, those changes overwrite however the file was before. I can also save it as a new file, or export it into a different format. Here in After Effects, the image is identical and the layers have been preserved by importing that Photoshop document as a composition. But everything else looks pretty different. However, I can still solo the rainbow. It still has a linear light blending mode applied to it. The car and shadow are still their own layer, but not a folder; if I want to see their contents, I'll double click the composition that's containing those layers. And that has yet another composition inside of it. So I have to go down a few layers to get to the source layers that make up that folder. If I want to save out an image, I have several ways to do it, but they're not accessed by choosing File Save, which just saves this project. Rather, I would choose Composition, and I might render it, or in this case, I could also save the frame as Photoshop layers to write a new Photoshop file. Now we're looking at a comp that was created as part of Andy Needham's "Learning Cinema 4D R21" course. Cinema 4D is a dedicated 3D animation package, and it was used, in particular, to create this text with all these detailed bevels and reflections and light interactions. That would all be really difficult, if not impossible, to do in the shipping version of After Effects, and this is nowhere near, say, a Pixar animation, which you could start to approach in Cinema 4D. So, After Effects, natively, can create animated 3D text and shapes, but Cinema 4D can go quite a bit further. And there's a bridge between the two. It's called Cineware, and it allows you to bring in a Cinema 4D scene and render it right in the comp. So there's a Lite version of Cinema 4D, which we're going to take a look at now. Over here in Cinema 4D Lite, you can see that same animation, and you can see a lot more of the detail that went into it and the controls over things like lighting that I didn't have in that comp. I can even go down to the level of individual elements and adjust them here. Finally, if you work in Illustrator or InDesign, you know the huge advantage of vector files, specifically, you can scale 'em up like crazy and retain edge detail. Here I'm at over 3,000%. Now, you can't create a vector file in After Effects, but you can work with them and preserve their capabilities and certain elements that you create in After Effects, such as shape layers, also have those capabilities. So in many ways, After Effects is like the Swiss Army knife of video. It includes tools useful for almost every major video task, but some of those tools are not as specialized for specific jobs as a tool with fewer overall functions. That said, After Effects is truly the tool of choice for motion graphics, and it is widely used for visual effects and animation. Those are true statements, not just when you compare it to other creative cloud applications, as we have here, but to any currently available software.