VFX History: After Effects

Forum|Forum|1 month ago
June 15, 2026
3 replies
55 views

I’ve done another deep dive into VFX lore and this time it is about After Effects itself. The origin story is crazy and to tell it I got to speak to Brian Maffitt (the first video tutorials creator) and Chris and Trish Meyer (the beta-tested v1 and wrote the first book on learning AE). I also discovered an emulator capable of running AEv1 and got JakeInMotion and SternFX to try it out.

If you have a spare 45 minutes, I hope you’ll enjoy learning a bit about the early days of After Effects.

thepixelsmith

Community Expert

I watched this on YouTube. It was very cool

Jerron Smith | www.thepixelsmith.com

ShiveringCactus

Author

Community Expert

Thank you. Everyone seems to be responding very positively.

Conrad_C

Community Expert

I enjoyed watching that, thanks for making it and for interviewing some of the most revered names in After Effects history!

I was there for part of it; when I worked at Aldus I was asked to help update the After Effects user manual shortly after CoSA was acquired. At that time I had not used anything like After Effects, at that point my background was in still images only. The team, and especially the Daves and Dan, were extremely gracious, helpful, and patient explaining the details about how After Effects worked, and made my job much easier. Great people all around.

I still have a CoSA After Effects product box. Your video filled in a lot of CoSA history I had not known about before.

There’s just one very minor glitch I noticed in the video: At 21:35, the street address of Aldus is shown as 1 First Avenue South in Seattle. Our building’s address was actually 411 First Avenue South. But, that’s not really important to the story of course. Overall, very well done.

ShiveringCactus

Author

Community Expert

Hey thank you! That must have been cool, using Aldus’ tools to improve their manual.

And I thought I was so clever doing to Google maps thing, with the address. I think I looked it up from on a product photo to get the address, but given the amount of trawling I had to do, it’s entirely likely I got mixed up. Maybe I just didn’t copy the address fully. But I’m glad it didn’t detract too much. And thank you for sharing you own memories of AE.

Nishu Kushwaha

Community Manager

ShiveringCactus, what a brilliant project. Thank you for putting this together! Really appreciate you sharing it with the community. Adding it to my watch list for the weekend, and I hope folks here block out the 45 minutes.

Thanks for the deep dive!

Thanks,

Nishu

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