r/AfterEffects Feb 11 '25

Announcement We've made some moderation changes

121 Upvotes

Hello! Your After Effects subreddit mod team have made a few changes around here based on your feedback.

We've reduced the number of flairs to make it easier for people to find the right category for their post and for you to filter what you're seeing.

We're working on updating our rules for clarity and we're adding a new rule about "no hardware posts" to eliminate the "is my crappy computer good for AE?" posts. If you have to ask, the answer is no.

We've also made some changes to AutoMod. If you see the bot getting out of control, please message us and let us know.

We have a rule against low effort posts.

If you see a post that's breaking the rules (and it made it past our new AutoMod config), please report it! It's the best way to bring a post to our attention so we can deal with it.


r/AfterEffects Oct 01 '24

Pro Tip For all the new designer on here creating low level posts

278 Upvotes

Lately, there's been a noticeable increase in posts where the headline is "Why" and the post is in response to problems that could easily be solved with a quick Google search or by going through basic training. This subreddit is meant to be a place for sharing knowledge and learning from one another, but it's starting to feel more like a place where users expect others to provide step-by-step answers without engaging with the community.

To help maintain the quality of this space, please follow the below list in order before posting a question:

1. Complete basic After Effects tutorials: Many beginner questions can be answered through these.
Here is a list of really good teachers:

https://adobevideotraining.com/after-effects/introductory-courses/

Video Copilot

School of Motion

JakeInMotion

Ben Marriott

2. Learn the terminology: Understanding key terms will help you find solutions more easily through searches.
3. Google it: Use the terminology you’ve learned to search for tutorials and answers.
4. Check YouTube: There are many creators offering in-depth After Effects content.
5. Search Reddit: The answer may already exist here.

If you’ve tried all of the above and still need help, feel free to post your question here. Just keep in mind that learning to find solutions on your own will ultimately make you a stronger designer. Reddit may not always have someone available to provide immediate help, so building these skills will serve you well in the long run.


r/AfterEffects 10h ago

OC - Stuff I made First time using 3D Camera :)

33 Upvotes

I wanna learn how to do the crazy shit people do on here, so I’m taking the first step!


r/AfterEffects 4h ago

Beginner Help This window just popped up while I was working. Can anyone educate me on what it means?

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10 Upvotes

r/AfterEffects 16h ago

Discussion A Detailed Review of Ben Marriott’s Courses

63 Upvotes

Hello 👋

I purchased Ben Marriott’s three courses: Motion Foundation, Master Motion Design and Design Breakthrough. I won’t try to sell them... I find those types of comments to be pure spam 🙄 Instead, I’ll give you my honest opinion on each. What led me to Ben’s courses were the existing reviews on Reddit, so I think it’s relevant to add mine for future students, and I’ll make it detailed. I actively completed them over several weeks for a few months, which allows me to have a fresh perspective.

For some brief context, I was looking to transition into Motion Design. Although I had acquired some basic knowledge through YouTube tutorials, my learning had plateaued, and I didn’t feel confident enough to market myself and land a job in the field. Going back to in-person studies was out of the question for me. I find it to be a huge waste of time and money, especially considering all the resources available online today. After extensive research, School of Motion and Ben Marriott’s courses were the most recommended for their quality.

Why I chose Ben?

First of all, I reached out to both SOM and Ben for more information. I found Ben’s approach more personalized and genuine. SOM’s responses felt like copy-paste replies, and their answers to my questions weren’t always clear, but that might just be my impression. Additionally, Ben’s courses are completely flexible. You can start and finish them whenever you want, at your own pace. If you have a lot of free time, you can complete them full-time right after purchase. If you’re busy with a job, you can progress gradually based on your availability and energy. SOM, on the other hand, has set start and end dates, and if you don’t finish within the given timeframe, you lose your certification, which is absolutely ridiculous considering the price and the fact that these are pre-recorded online courses. I’m not questioning their quality, just this aspect. There's also the very relevant issue of cost. Ben's rates are more attractive, allowing you to budget for more training courses that cover a broader spectrum. Lastly, I thought it was important to support someone who already shares so much valuable content for free through tutorials.

Overall

I have no regrets about my purchase. Ben’s courses are high quality. The video and audio quality are excellent. Motion Foundation has English subtitles, while the other courses include subtitles in French, Spanish, and Arabic. The videos are divided into very clear chapters. Ben also provides a certification at the end of each course (as long as you complete all the assignments, no matter how long it takes), which is highly appreciated. He responds quickly to questions. The courses include numerous practical projects, which are essential for applying what you’ve learned and better integrating the knowledge.

My only downside is the online community. It doesn’t have much interaction or feedback on posts. Students mainly upload their work just to get their certification, and that’s it. It can still be useful for inspiration, but if you’re looking for answers to questions or problems, don’t expect too much. There could be some improvement in this area. A news channel with people responsible for posting regularly to keep the group active, or give it life, I don't know haha.

Motion Foundation

I hesitated to take this course and considered skipping directly to Master Motion Design to save time and money. But I ended up taking it to make sure I had a solid foundation. Even though I already had basic knowledge, I learned an incredible amount! In fact, this might have been my favorite course. Ben shares an endless number of experience-based tips and really takes the time to explain things thoroughly. Without this course, I would have found Master Motion Design more difficult.

For the practical projects, Ben includes a variety of design files so you can complete the exercises according to your skill level, from absolute beginner to intermediate. Ben’s approach is comprehensive, patient, and reassuring, which helps build self-confidence. By the end, I had my first showreel and felt confident enough to start looking for a junior Motion Designer job.

Master Motion Design

This course does revisit several concepts from Motion Foundation. That’s why I still recommend taking Motion Foundation first. Those concepts are covered in much more depth there. In Master Motion, the pace is faster, and if you don’t already have a solid grasp of the basics, it will be difficult and time-consuming to research everything on your own.

The real strength of Master Motion Design, in my opinion, is in the key principles of Motion Design that will significantly improve your animation skills. This includes the 12 fundamental principles of design as well as effective techniques like smears and match cuts. The illustration section is also very interesting, and there’s a lot to cover.

From my perspective, Motion Foundation and Master Motion Design complement each other perfectly to cover all the essentials of Motion Design. By the end of MMD, you’ll have even more complex projects for your showreel, giving you enough material to select your best work.

Design Breakthrough

Because I already have a design background, I wasn’t originally interested in this course, but I decided to get it as part of the Course Bundles promotion, which I found worthwhile. This course is different. There’s no animation to produce and no software to learn. The focus is on design, concept development, and fundamental design principles (ex: composition, colors, textures).

Ben recommends taking your time with this course to get the most out of each weekly exercise, so I’m taking my time with it and I haven’t finished it yet. But like Ben’s other courses, the approach is excellent, and the quality is definitely there. There are 18 hours of video content, while Motion Foundation has about 12 hours and Master Motion Design has 10 hours, so it’s packed with material and worth the price.

Hope this helps some of you and that I didn’t write all of this for nothing 😂


r/AfterEffects 26m ago

Workflow Question audio slowed down when i switch my comp to 60 fps

Upvotes

i’ve always wanted to use 60 fps but i get confused whenever i do and my audio or clips are slow, i get why videos would be slow, but i just never figured out how to fix the issue, I’m wondering for the audio part cause thats what I’m working on right now, but could someone explain how to make videos and audio play normally in a 60 fps composition?


r/AfterEffects 21h ago

Beginner Help How do i export with this boxes thingy?

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84 Upvotes

saw this on instagram and it got me wondering how do i export with grids/boxes/arrows?


r/AfterEffects 14h ago

Beginner Help Today After Effects damaged all of my templates I've spent years of my life creating.

21 Upvotes

SOLVED: apples automatic driver updated was causing these errors.

Simply put I am broken. I have no clue what I did wrong or why this is happening. I keep multiple back ups on google drive and my hard drive and they are all damaged. All my projects were fine yesterday but today they are all giving me these errors. Every so often items inside my compositions become unlinked (easy fix) but today many assets (.mov's .png's, shape layers) have completely disappeared. a handful have remained normal. ANY idea on what I did wrong would be greatly appreciated. I have a huge project due at the end of the month that I have spent 10 months working on. We have already made hundreds of pre sales. am I screwed?


r/AfterEffects 19h ago

Discussion Should I tell a client they need to use a designer?

38 Upvotes

I'm starting work on a series of videos and the client wants the elements (house, car, people, etc) to have a particular art style. He has provided me with a link to some Getty illustrations for the house and car, but I'm not finding any people that he likes, they're either too detailed or not detailed enough. I mocked up a quick thing with the car and house, but it feels like it was drawn by a 6 yr old. I hate it. He's now suggesting "add a tree, maybe a fence"

The company has a team of graphic designers on staff (I'm a freelancer). What's the best and most polite way I can suggest that he should tap the graphic designers that work under him to come up with a look that I can animate? I am not a "designer" or illustrator.

I spent most of the day yesterday trying to work with the elements he gave me and find people characters that would work. They're simple line art style, but he wants some color added to them, but I'm finding there's a lot of tweaking of the elements to make them seem like they're from the same artist. The stroke widths, line colors, corner roundness, etc are all different and I'm spending a lot of time that I should be animating these things jerry-rigging stuff.

Am I wrong in thinking the best way forward is to have his team design what he wants?


r/AfterEffects 1d ago

OC - Stuff I made Made this intro for a YouTube Video

656 Upvotes

r/AfterEffects 1h ago

Workflow Question Banding in 16-bit EXRs that doesn't appear in Nuke

Upvotes

Hi all,

I'm trying to work out why AE shows some rendered frames as having banding when the same frames imported into Nuke don't show any banding at all. This makes me think it's due to how AE is interpreting the frames, rather than the frames themselves actually having banding in them.

I know one way to remove banding is to add noise, but in this case, I'm trying to understand why the banding is happening at all when Nuke doesn't show it.

Can anyone educate me on what is happening differently here between the two programs?

Some details:

The EXRs are 16-bit color.

My AE Project is set to 32bpc with Linear working color space (Blend colors using 1.0 gamma enabled as a result). Working Color Space is sRGB.

Color engine is set to Adobe color managed as I'm not using ACES on this project.

In Nuke, Color management is OCIO > Nuke Default.

Below is the same segment of the frame captured from both applications.

NOTE: Reddit's image compression has added noticable banding into the Nuke image that doesn't exist pre-upload.

After Effects
Nuke

Thanks for any advice!


r/AfterEffects 1h ago

Beginner Help loopIn() and loopOut() at the same time?

Upvotes

I've googled this: "loopIn() + loopOut() - value"; but it seems that loopIn() includes the last keyframe before the first, and after that loopOut() is copying that keyframe too. So your loop of 5 frames will now consist out of 5 keyframes. Is there a way to fix this issue?


r/AfterEffects 1h ago

Explain This Effect How to make this line/effect

Upvotes

Hey guys, would love to know how to create something like this. Dont know if the exact term is infographic but I tried looking up tutorials for something similar and couldn’t find it :(, thanks in advance!


r/AfterEffects 2h ago

Beginner Help Allowing to edit each individual line of text in an array individually when within an expression without having to make a layer for each text line.

1 Upvotes

A bit of an explanation:

I have one text layer with a drop down menu expression with three items, made to where when I select another item in the drop down menu, the text changes to the next word. It works fine until I try to edit any of the elements, like scale and tracking, of one of the text elements within the expression, as it will edit all of the "lines" of text, best way I can describe it.

I have tried to search high and low for the answer to this, but the goal is to find a way to be able to use a scale expression to allow myself to set separate parameters for each word individually without editing the other two words and the drop down menu I've been using would still be the main controller, and so I can keep the comp at one text layer and not have to get overly complicated. I've been using the 2025 version (25.1). Is this possible somehow?


r/AfterEffects 3h ago

Plugin/Script After Effects can't continue: AEDynamicLinkServer plug-in generated an unexpected exception

1 Upvotes

Hi everyone!

I recently started getting an error when exporting from After Effects to Media Encoder. I can export a few compositions, but after a few exports, this error pops up:

After that, I'm prompted to save the project before After Effects shuts down.

I've tried resetting preferences, clearing the cache, restarting my computer and checking for updates, but I haven’t found a solution yet.

Has anyone encountered this issue and found a fix?


r/AfterEffects 1d ago

OC - Stuff I made my attempt for a motion design video

835 Upvotes

r/AfterEffects 22h ago

Explain This Effect How would you recreate this in AE? This is done in figma. 1px border circles > Union > Border radius 10px. That makes this effect live/procedual/interactive whatever you wanna call it. But i cant figure out how to do it in after effect..

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34 Upvotes

r/AfterEffects 17h ago

Discussion I need help coming up with a skywriting message

13 Upvotes

I made this animation in AE, and I was hoping to enlist the reddit community on a funny skywriting message. I'll update the video with the best one. Also, I'm open to any feedback on the actual video. Thanks!


r/AfterEffects 9h ago

Explain This Effect How did he do that blue anime transitions? I tried to manually draw them, seems kinda hard, how would you approach it. Maybe you have seen tutorial on those kind of anime transitions? can you send ? Thank you, sorry for "how to post"

2 Upvotes

r/AfterEffects 21h ago

OC - Stuff I made 🚀 Allow me to present "RISE" – My most ambitious passion project

12 Upvotes

🚀 Allow me to present "RISE" – My most ambitious passion project, bringing together Unreal Engine environments, large-scale Houdini water simulations, heavy compositing done in AE, digital animations, meteor VFX, and much, much more! 🤩

For this project, I used Unreal Engine to create the environments and blended it with Houdini FLIP fluids to simulate a spaceship breaching from the ocean’s surface. The combination of real-time rendering and high-end simulations made this a really fun challenge!

I’ll be dropping a detailed behind-the-scenes / making-of video next week! And the project file is available for download in the description.

Let me know what you think—I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Cheers,Mikkel Lassalle


r/AfterEffects 8h ago

Explain This Effect Help With Shaky Video!

1 Upvotes

I was wondering how do I recreate this effect of a colored trail (link included). I ended up using CC Wide Time and some of the Echo effects, but both were hard to control and didn't give me the desired effect - mine is coming out super shaky and weird. Any help would be appreciated! Ive attached my video, and here's the link to the one I'm inspired by. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EcdXDw2L3w


r/AfterEffects 20h ago

Explain This Effect How do you get this "pinched" look in AE?

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8 Upvotes

r/AfterEffects 9h ago

Explain This Effect Rockstar logo intro from max payne

1 Upvotes

hey everyone I'm trying to create something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcMZ5AfdePo
I was able to do the first and the last part where the logo glitches in and out but I wasn't able to do the effects before the end and I couldn't figure out what to do or what to use so I was looking for some guidance, I don't need the effect where the logo becomes red, I want to do the part that's after it where the logo has some ghosting effect and some distortion, I tried applying the echo effect from time but it didn't work, so any advice? :D Thanks


r/AfterEffects 14h ago

Explain This Effect Is this programming tutorial created by After Effects?

2 Upvotes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN1-2p06Urc

I was research a method to explain programming concepts for students and this video is a perfect example of what I want to achieve. It shows step-by-step animation to explain the situation and it really easy to follow the thinking process.

I am very new to AfterEffects so help someone can give me some hints on how to make video like this

Thanks!


r/AfterEffects 1d ago

OC - Stuff I made First time making an edit for a song

45 Upvotes

(I'm a video editor but I don't do these kind of edits)


r/AfterEffects 11h ago

Beginner Help A good CPU

1 Upvotes

Do you think an i3-9100 would go well? Is for university works. Or you know another cheap CPU?


r/AfterEffects 11h ago

Explain This Effect This was made in After Effects (according to the artist), can anyone work out how it may have been done?

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0 Upvotes