Best Options/Practices for Animated Video

[Wolfdrummer]

Firstly I apologize if there is a thread here somewhere that already addressed this however I will admit I am a man and finding things is hard. 

Now my bio. I am elementary music teacher and as many of you all know education is a bit of fiasco at this point in time. I am wanting to make animated/flash style videos for my students to watch when they are at home. I figure a fun animated video of me discussing topics is better then a video of me sitting in my classroom talking. Now I have some experience with premiere but little to no experience with making flash style videos. 

My question.  Through my research online it looks like animated video can be created in either Animate, After Effects, and/or Premiere. What is the best option and what is the best practice?  Do I us animate or after effects to create the animation. Export that to Premiere and combine it with audio that I record?  I've seen videos of people making animated videos in Premiere with assets brought over from other CC suite titles?

I thank anyone who can guide me in the correct direction. Also as I am writing this I realized I could have googled Flash videos for dummies. 

[Steve Griffiths · Accepted solution]

No simple answer and 'it depends'!

Simple animation of text and images, keying out green/bluescreen backgrounds etc is possible in Premiere Pro (PP). So as you will need to be editing your videos in PP anyway, this is a good place to start. A lot of what you learn to do here will translate over to other applications. If you want to be doing more complex stuff then After Effects and Animate will be will allow you to do much more creative stuff ... with a big learning curve.

I'm not familiar with Animate but use After Effects extensively for all sorts of animations, infographics, titles and character animation etc.

Consider though that I might spend an entire day (or two) working on 15-20 seconds of animated graphics. I do a 3.5 second title animation using images text and effects for a show (Media Bites) and spend 3-4 hours on it. So be prepared to add to your already full day as a teacher to achieve what might be a very short piece.

To answer you specific questions:

Sharing assets between PP & AE is common. i.e. a sequence made in PP may be exported into AE for additional work after the initial edit. Stuff created in AE might be overlayed with footage in PP. Very regularly you would expect to start in Premiere Pro, edit a 'base' (sound and vision) for you to then add animated graphics to.

[Wolfdrummer]

Thank you.  This was more then helpfull in getting me pointed in the right direction.

[Wolfdrummer]

Thank you both,  Steve_Griffiths and Andy 1968 for your responses.  I was uncertain on how each program worked with eachother and really what the role fo each progam played in the bigger picture, as many of the You Tube videos I had found made it seem like each program could complete the same tasks.  From what you have givven me I feel confident that I can figure the rest out.  Again thank you for the guidance and advice. 

[Andy 1968]

If you are a music teacher I would like to think AE, Animate,  Premiere Pro and even Flash would be less usefull than Musescore and Shadowplay. That being said what are you trying to do? Do you think you would ever do anything like in the video below with the music staff?

https://youtu.be/2OlTNqFTBRg

[Wolfdrummer]

I have never heard of Shadowplay but also as an elementary music teacher i am not looking at making in depth video tutorials.  My idea is takinng my recorder lessons and creating simple animations and graphics that I vocie over explaining concepts.  As well as making little short videos about instrumetns and composers that have that old timey early 2000's flash, or South Park aesthetic to them.  Thank you for your sugestions.

[Andy 1968]

Now we are getting somewhere. South Park is character animation. Keep in kind you might create some parts in AE, Illustrator, Power Point etc but Premiere Pro is what you would want to use to combine/edit all the elements.