7 Things You Should Know About After Effects
1. What is it?
It is a program that allows a user to create motion graphics and visual effects to multimedia projects
2. Who's doing it?
After Effects is used by many professionals in the advertising and movie industries. Artists, media designers and video editors use it to create animations, interactive content, titles sequences and lower-thirds text.
3. How does it work?
After Effects is best used for creating short (under five minutes) image sequences. It can incorporate sound files, but these are best edited in other programs such as Audacity or Soundtrack Pro. Primarily, one would import video footage, stills or image sequences. These image sequences can be imported in a variety of formats such as pngs, jpgs, and Photoshop files with or without an alpha channel. (An alpha channel combines an image with a background to create the appearance of partial transparency.) Project media can be altered in both 2D and 3D space. Many users of 3D packages such as Maya use After Effects to layer in lighting effects and animations. There are also over 200 animation presets and effects with multiple variations and tweaks available.
After Effects incorporates a timeline that allows a user to work with layers. Compositions can be nested inside of other compositions. The user can affect changes in the video such as opacity, position, and create complex masks and remove backgrounds or elements. Compositing is best achieved using a green screen during the video shooting process. After Effects has a quick way to pull colors from a shot making it extremely valuable for compositors. More importantly, this can be done to an entire sequence as opposed to working with each frame individually, saving copious amounts of time.
4. Why is it significant?
After Effects can be used to enhance the quality of videos. Visual culture is of growing importance as people use images and videos more and more to communicate. As styles and fads change, those making videos for use in various venues can use After Effects to stay current and create a wide variety of dynamic videos that engage and keep the viewers attention.
5. What are the downsides?
After Effects is a robust program that offers many options for creating motion graphics and compositing. Like Photoshop and other complicated programs, it takes time to learn what is possible. One could spend a career exploring the possibilities that After Effects affords the user. Creating motion graphics is also a time-consuming activity.
6. Where is it going?
After Effects provides a way to create video art projects, dynamic graphics and composite images quickly. Because it is so involved and robust, the user could find new ways of using it the more time she spends exploring the options. Adobe continues to add new options and improvements in each new release. CS5 is the latest release.
The OSU Art Department teaches a class using this program every year (Digital Image Manipulation II [Moving Image Art] Art 550).
7. What are the implications for teaching?
The best use of this program is in making short videos and text graphics. This is not a tool to support teaching and learning. It is rather a tool to learn or to teach.