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Maj wrote:

ikusat wrote:Can anyone post some neat effects they do? There's just too many options to play around with, and they all seem to do nothing.

That question would make a pretty good thread. I don't remember the names of the ones which impressed me, but if you start the thread i'll post them up when i have a chance to look through AE tonight. A lot of those transitions scare me too, so i'm hoping other people will share their discoveries/successes as well.

So here you have it. What kind of neat effects can you do with After Effects? There's too much to work with, and its really overwhelming without any starting references. The only tutorials I've seen on the net were how to do stuff that Premiere could do in a far simplier manner...

http://www.ayatoweb.com/

after effects tips, oh yeah and there's an english link at the top left.

There are countless things you can do with AE that can't be done with Premiere. Right off the bat, the cool thing about AE is that it lets you work with multiple clips simultaneously. You can add a background image easily and even do transparency effects to make logos or whatever. With Premiere, you have to go through a whole bunch of convoluted steps work with multiple sources simultaneously.

Also AE has a whole bunch of custom text effects that you can apply as layers while editing. You don't have to make text images in Photoshop then import them as static layers.

All objects in AE can be rotated in 3D and these movements can be animated using keyframes. Premiere has a couple of limited effects which mimic 3D, but aren't anywhere near as versatile or authentic. Just move the arrow over a clip, open up the Transform menu and click on one of the stopwatches, then move the arrow further down the clip and alter the value. AE will animate the shift from one keyframe to the next. Play around with different effects and see what works for you.

It's true that some basic Premiere stuff (like Cross Fade) takes more steps in AE, but a lot of really advanced stuff takes the same number of steps and isn't even possible in Premiere.

Trapcode --> Shine

Sweet, thanks for the info and links!

I thought this was really useful.

http://www.videocopilot.net/basic/index.html

How do you speed up a clip gradually? When i use Layer -> Time Stretch, it modifies the whole clip at once.

edit: Nevermind, found it. Layer -> Enable Time Remapping adds a bunch of time-related tools to the Timeline panel. You actually control playback speed by moving the keyframe for the target time marker, which is a bit backwards, but you can see the change in play speed as you do this so i guess it works. For example if you want to double the speed of a two second clip, you move the Time Remap keyframe at the end of the clip to the halfway point. AE will double the speed of the clip in order to reach the end of the clip at the one-second mark where you put the keyframe. You can also smooth out the acceleration by moving the points on the graph. It's called Ease Adjustment so look that up for more info if you need it.