How to turn effects on and off

[Rob6556]

After Effects seems like the most complicated thing in the world. The in-app tutorials literally don't work for me; when I click on them, nothing loads, so I can't even use those to try to teach me, and when I look up how to use it on animations online, all I get is how to make animations in the app itself. 

What I'm trying to use After Effects for is to add effects to an animation I already made. Which I have found zero help for online. All I could find is a tutorial explaining how to open the fla. file in after effects, then it says, "The only limit is your creativity," like- no the limit is everything else after that because no one explains how to actually implement the effects to the animation.

Anyway- I am trying to just figure all this out myself, but I can't understand how to stop using an effect. Say I'm using the Ripple Pusle effect on layer 30 from 00:43:00 to 00:46:00, after that I don't need it anymore, but the effect wont go away, it's just there indefinitely. That's my problem. 

Layer 30 was used for more than just one instance, meaning I cant just leave the effect on, it looks horrible for the rest of the animation. But if I remove the effect, then it wont be there from,  00:43:00 to 00:46:00

How do I deal with this?

[Kyle Hamrick]

There's a lot going on in this question, and while you obviously know this, I can't emphasize enough the importance of spending some time to learn the basics of After Effects. For your purposes here, adding effects to an .fla is the same as adding them to any other image or clip, so I suspect you're being overly literal with your searches. 

Some short posible answers to your question:

• You can split layers ( Edit > Split Layer or CTRL/CMD + SHIFT + D) so you can have two copies: one with the effect, and one without. This would be a hard cut between those states, or you can use Opacity keyframes to blend, if that's appropriate for your use case. 
• All effects have properties that you can change or animate. Often, you'll be able to animate the appearance of the effect so it can smoothly transition from being visible to not being visible. This won't be the case for all effects, though. In particular, the effect you've chosen, CC Ripple Pulse, will stop having any visible effect on the layer if you keyframe the Pulse Level property to 0. 

[Rob6556]

I already went through most of those, and when the in-app tutorials did work, those were helpful. Hence, I'm pissed that nothing happens when I click them, so I can't actually finish using them. A lot of them were about creating animations and presentations in After Effects, which doesn't assist me much since the animations I have are already animated. 

Using the opacity option feels somewhat tedious when over ten effects are running, each with their own levels to adjust, but if that is what must be done.

[ShiveringCactus]

After Effects is closer to Photoshop than to a video editor.  Adding an effect to an existing animation is like adding a layer style in Photoshop. It's either on or off, if you want it on for a portion of the time, then you need to split your animation so that you have a separate layer just for when you want the effect.  Then you can go ahead and apply it.  At the end of the layer the effect will disappear.

I cover this in a tutorial I made for CreativeCow a little while back: https://youtu.be/v-2aI65ssuU

[RobShultz]

Have you tried using an adjustment layer? Layer/New/Adjustment Layer. Place the effect on the adjustment layer over the layers that you want the effect on? The length of an adjustment layer can be trimmed.  You can also pre-compose an adjustment layer and the designated layers for the effect so that it doesn't hit the other layers.

[Rick Gerard]

Even without a mask, all effects in the currently available releases of After Effects have Effect Opacity available at the bottom of the compositing options. Animate that. You could easily just turn off one of all 40 effects applied to the same layer if you needed to.