Desire to learn After Effects Logistics and Workflow

Report · Nov 22, 2021

Hi Adobe Folks,

I have toyed on and off with After Effects over the years an over this holiday season while it's doing nothing but snow I'd like to dig into Afters Effects and really get a better feel for how it swims.

I've had years of experience in Photoshop/Animate, I understand timeline basics, blending modes/mattes, time remapping and a number of the general things in After Effects, but I'd really like to learn how to be efficient at it.

Like, I've built out shortcuts and have a number of methods in Photoshop and Animate to help streamline my process. I'd really like to get to know all the shortcuts and/or any general plugins/presets associated with workflow that professionals use all the time.

Eventually, I'd like to do motion graphics for social media units etc. but I want to know how to do stuff FAST.

If anybody knows of resources I might use or areas I should study this that would be really cool.

Thanks for reading.

Report · Nov 24, 2021

Hi and welcome to the community!

I learned a lot in AE by just starting and doing it. Whenever I got stuck, I searched in the web and sometimes watched a tutorial. School of Motion have a lot of quality videos online: https://www.youtube.com/c/Schoolofmotion/videos

Beside this, you created your tools in Photoshop and Animate over years and they perfectly fit your workflow. You have to do the same with AE. There is no magic toolset which will fast forward you. It all depends on what you are doing regulary, which tasks are repetitively and can be automated or shotcutted.

I used to work with flow (https://aescripts.com/flow/) and lazy (https://aescripts.com/lazy/) a lot to shotcut ease and staggered delay. Motion v3 (https://www.mtmograph.com/products/motion-3) is a creat toolkit and helps to organsize complex projects by creating (virtual) layer groups. DUIK (https://rainboxlab.org/tools/duik/) is a creat toolkit for character rigging/animation and day-by-day tasks. You'll need a tool to quickly move the anchoir point (e.g.: https://aescripts.com/move-anchor-point/), or you are lost. And I really liked the FX Console from VideoCopilot (not sure if latest version: https://www.videocopilot.net/blog/2018/05/fx-console-updated-to-v1-0-3/).

It's always an advantage to learn Expressions. You can connect properies with a given logic and create project wide links. It's helpful to shape a behaviour and take out the detail work once you have rigged everything. The hardest part about expressions is to decide if it's worth the time to write one 😉

And the onboard animators and animation presets are ofter underestimated. But in face they are a fast and powerful tool set once you know them. It goes the same with the onboard effects.

Get into it, do your motion graphics and you will soon be fast doing them. Also, you will realize what takes time. Chances are high that there is a tutorial showing how to get it done more efficient or a script, capable of automating the process.

Have fun!

*Martin

Report · Dec 27, 2021

Hi Martin,

Super belated response, but I've just been stupid busy for all of December. I just wanted to say thanks for such a throrough and helpful response. You're right, you really figure out what you need by what you do an AE is so diverse that you might have diverse tools and shortcuts, but never use them.

Recently, I've made a turn to try and figure out more about JSX in Photoshop for automating image processing. I'm hoping I can one day find a use for that in AE as well.

Thanks again!