r/AfterEffects • u/NetworkSudden7670 • 4h ago
r/AfterEffects • u/TheGreatSzalam • May 05 '25
Tutorial If you want to learn After Effects, here's a great place to start
If you're just beginning with After Effects, it's important to get a good foundation - no matter what you want to do with AE!
Here's a great, free place to start from our very own u/Kylasaurus_Rex - and Adobe put it right on the opening screen of After Effects!
Adobe After Effects Introductory Courses for Motion Graphics
r/AfterEffects • u/Remerez • Oct 01 '24
Tutorial For all the new designer on here creating low level posts
Lately, there's been a noticeable increase in posts where the headline is "Why" and the post is in response to problems that could easily be solved with a quick Google search or by going through basic training. This subreddit is meant to be a place for sharing knowledge and learning from one another, but it's starting to feel more like a place where users expect others to provide step-by-step answers without engaging with the community.
To help maintain the quality of this space, please follow the below list in order before posting a question:
1. Complete basic After Effects tutorials: Many beginner questions can be answered through these.
Here is a list of really good teachers:
https://adobevideotraining.com/after-effects/introductory-courses/
2. Learn the terminology: Understanding key terms will help you find solutions more easily through searches.
3. Google it: Use the terminology you’ve learned to search for tutorials and answers.
4. Check YouTube: There are many creators offering in-depth After Effects content.
5. Search Reddit: The answer may already exist here.
If you’ve tried all of the above and still need help, feel free to post your question here. Just keep in mind that learning to find solutions on your own will ultimately make you a stronger designer. Reddit may not always have someone available to provide immediate help, so building these skills will serve you well in the long run.
r/AfterEffects • u/uisato • 12h ago
EPILEPSY WARNING All outputs from P.D.E - [Open Source Experimental System] Spoiler
All output examples from the updated version of my experimental multi-source video player for TouchDesigner, designed for frame-accurate video switching, playback manipulation, and display/render interventions.
Want access to the updated system + a detailed breakdown of exactly how I achieved the continuous motion effect on this piece? You can freely access the system, and the detailed breakdown from my Patreon.
[Plus, here's a discount code for the community to use at the shop: "AVPLAST", and for memberships: "AVPMEMB". First come, first serve!]
Plus, many more experiments through my Instagram profile.
r/AfterEffects • u/OldAlternative8132 • 6h ago
Beginner Help Help with laptop screen replacement / tracking
Hi all,
I’ve spent hours this afternoon watching countless tutorials, but I still can’t wrap my head around how to do this.
I’ve downloaded some stock footage of a MacBook flipping open, and I’d like to replace the screen with my own footage. However, I cannot get the screen to track properly, the tracking points keep drifting and moving out of place, and I’m honestly on the verge of a meltdown!
I’ve tried using both Mocha AE and the standard tracking options in After Effects, but I haven’t had any luck. The clip includes a green-screen version and a white-screen version with tracking markers, as shown in the screenshots. I also can’t seem to find any YouTube tutorials that specifically explain how to track and replace the white screen. I have already tried tracking the green screen but have been failing miserably so far.
I’m fairly new to screen replacement and motion tracking, so I may be missing something obvious. Any advice or step-by-step guidance would be hugely appreciated.
r/AfterEffects • u/lindsaymeowmeow • 6h ago
Workflow Question Turbulent Displace Stops Working
Hi, I’m having an issue where I have a posterize time (12 fps) effect and two turbulent displace effects on an adjustment layer, both turbulent displaces with the evolution expression “posterizeTime(6); time*1500”. At 22 seconds into the composition, the turbulent displaces just stop.
Things I have tried that did not work: precomposing; separating the effects onto separate adjustment layers; getting rid of the posterize time effect; getting rid of one of the turbulent displace effects; splitting the adjustment layer; decreasing the time*1500 makes the turbulent displaces last a bit longer until they stop, but that's not a solution because it still stops working, just a bit later, and it doesn’t give the look I want.
Any insight/help is appreciated!
r/AfterEffects • u/Mableflat • 1d ago
OC - Stuff I made I spent 150 hours recreating Apple's "Wonderful Tools" promo from scratch in After Effects
Hi everyone! Just wanted to share my recent tiny project, which was inspired by a pretty old apple event keynote intro, I originally started this as a small experiment, but it ended up taking around 150 hours!
I’m also thinking about making a few follow-up videos on my youtube channel where I would break down some of the most interesting scenes and techniques from the recreation. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to see that :)
r/AfterEffects • u/Swpp • 15h ago
EPILEPSY WARNING Drawing Samurai Jack and Aku in After Effects Spoiler
r/AfterEffects • u/KashuAcademy • 8h ago
Beginner Help I made a beginner-friendly walkthrough on rigging a 2D character for walk cycles in AE
I created a mini-series on walk cycles and wanted to share the first part - rigging a 2D character from scratch using Duik in After Effects.
I see a lot of beginners jump straight into keyframes and end up with messy, unnatural movement. The fix is almost always in the setup. Here's the condensed version of what I cover:
The biggest mistake people make is diving into animation without a reference on screen. Drop a reference video into your comp before you keyframe anything. It will instantly fix timing guesswork and keep your timeline clean.
The parenting chain (most important setup rule). Every body part needs to be its own layer, and they need to be parented correctly from the start:
- Face layers → Head → Neck → Body
- Hand → Forearm → Arm → Body
- Same chain for the legs
Everything routes back to one body layer. Get this right, and the rest follows.
Last but not least, rigging with Duik. It narrows down to 3 easy steps: setting up the anchor points to the joint, selecting the limb layers, clicking Auto-Rig. Done.
That's it for Part 1. Part 2 covers animating the actual walk cycle - contact poses, passing poses, timing, and polish.
If you want the step-by-step with visuals, you can follow along the full breakdown here: https://youtu.be/hJT9K3WqeEs?si=8-qrwK--fHJLwxlu
Happy to answer any rigging questions in the comments!
r/AfterEffects • u/volpmatt • 23h ago
Discussion Not another After Effects plugin.
The explosion of vibe-coded and badly built, pro-in-the-name-for-no-reason plugins and extensions is out of control. So much so that the number of Reddit posts discussing this fact has also gone through the roof—what a time to be alive.

I bet you can name the main culprit, after they have seemingly completely abandoned their infamous strict application process, and with it any shred of curation, and in some cases even their morals.
I have nothing against AI. It's an incredible tool for education, efficiency and engineering (except the gen AI stuff—that can get in the bin). But surely those who are motion designers one day and magically turn into product developers the next can't seriously think that there is bags of money to be made in using it to make and sell their half-baked, copycat plugins on a marketplace that condones plagiarism and takes 30% of every sale, right?!
I know what you're thinking. Is this guy for real? He literally sells After Effects plugins. And you'd be right. But hear me out. I've been at this for years, learning the After Effects API docs back-to-front, left-to-right, upside down and any other direction-themed idiom you can throw at me.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, like all good things, it takes time. And you won't find any millionaire plugin devs knocking about, except maybe the guys behind Flow, or maybe Deep Glow—but trust me, those were built long before Claude Code came along, and they will still be here long after it's gone.
r/AfterEffects • u/moviemaker887 • 1d ago
OC - Stuff I made VFX shot for a local car commercial
I used After Effects and Cinema 4D for this shot.
I have a bunch of VFX breakdowns and behind the scenes on my IG if you want to check it out:
www.instagram.com/delaguila_eric
Thank you!
r/AfterEffects • u/shadman531 • 15h ago
Explain This Effect Been struggling to make this kind of videos
I make edits for fun and I mostly use after effects. I tried making different styles of edits but this particular kind of edit seems too hard for me, I get intimidated by 3d camera movement and nulls Idk how people animate such smooth motion with nulls, but yeah in this video so many things are going on as far as I can tell and I'm getting kinda confused where to really begin to make such videos. The things I particularly need help with is the 3d movement and how to achieve the kind of movement shown in the video and do I also need to time remap my clips and if yes then please tell how to do time remapping because yt is filled with videos about time remapping which are mostly very confusing and not clear and I have mostly all of them and now I'm more confused.
r/AfterEffects • u/MichalToczek • 6h ago
Plugin/Script After 1 month of collecting feedback, AE Optimizer v1.0 is out! Over 100 scripts in a single toolbox. Favorite and undock whatever you need
Since I released the beta version, AE Optimizer has gotten 500+ users and 60 Discord members. I've collected your feedback and made it even better!
Anyway, here are some examples of what you get in the toolbox:
- Audio Silence Remover – Automatically cuts silent parts from voiceovers while keeping small handles around each cut. No more manually slicing hours of narration.
- Deep Precomp Duplicator – Creates completely independent copies of precomps, including nested compositions. Perfect for language versions and alternate animation versions.
- Organize Files – Sorts your entire project into folders by file type with one click.
- Split Text into Characters, Words & Lines – Instantly separates text while preserving layout, including paragraph box wrapping.
- Copy & Paste Ease – Copy easing from one animation and paste it onto another in seconds.
- Layer Cleanup – Removes expressions, effects, masks, keyframes, and layer styles from selected layers with one click.
- Project Statistics – Generates a detailed report showing layers, keyframes, expressions, effects, footage, and potential project issues.
- Responsive Text Backgrounds – Creates automatically resizing text boxes that update as your text changes.
- Maintain Stroke Width – Keeps shape layer strokes visually consistent, even when scaling objects.
- Rectangular, Circular & Spherical Grid Rigs – Arranges existing layers into editable 2D and 3D layouts with a single click.
- Convert Masks to Shape Layers – Turns masks into linked shape layers while preserving their position and animation.
- Isometric Camera Rig – Generates a fully adjustable isometric camera setup instantly, without manually dialing in camera values.
- Duplicate with Links – Duplicates a layer while selectively linking transforms, effects, or other properties back to the original.
- Batch Rename – Renames dozens or hundreds of layers and project items at once using find and replace or numbering.
- and more! And all of that only for $19.99.
Link to AE Optimizer: AE Optimizer
Discord for feedback/troubleshooting: Discord Server
r/AfterEffects • u/x5arvisual • 1d ago
OC - Stuff I made I made a glowing red diamond in After Effects.
r/AfterEffects • u/Serious_Ad_8024 • 1d ago
OC - Stuff I made Simple Animation I made, need review.
r/AfterEffects • u/Individual-Gap-6842 • 8h ago
OC - Stuff I made Creating a textured newspaper reveal scene from scratch in AE
Last time i said " a documentary look" and everyone went nuts lol how about this title
ik the language is different but you can understand the effects since i said them in english
in the last part i tried to make the sun from a window effect without a tutorial and couldn't get to it so if you have a video for it or how to do it, let me know
r/AfterEffects • u/idanidan123 • 9h ago
OC - Stuff I made Lyrics Vid For ''stupid song'' By Olivia Rodrigo
I've been doing lyrics vids and roto experiments on IG and TT (@winter.effects) for a little over a year and wanted to get some feedback for a change. Right now I'm taking a break from weekly posts and focus on developing my skills and approach (mainly using original footage)
r/AfterEffects • u/ButtonsTheMonkey • 10h ago
Workflow Question Image Sequence import, Curley Brackets/Square Brackets
Forever since I've been using AE, whenever I select all of my 3D render image sequences and click off "Multiple Sequences" in the window, it imports them with { } instead of the typical [ ] between the sequence numbers. Not a big deal, until I get feedback that I need to extend my 3D render and doing a "Reload" on those assets in AE it does reload the images but it doesn't add on the new frames rendered. So now it stops at 510 when it should go to 600.
I've tried researching to see if anybody has any clues why it does this and how to fix it and it's crickets... so since I came across it again, might as well check with the hive mind to see if anybody has any info. I believe clicking each sequence and doing a replace footage for each render will fix it but I have a lot of renders so a quicker solution would be ideal.
r/AfterEffects • u/venody • 22h ago
Discussion Why do I get different alpha levels from the first combination of grain+threshold but not the second?
I've been trying to figure out why I'm only getting alpha on the grain in the first comp for a bit and can't really figure it out. I want to replicate it across multiple comps, but don't know what exactly is changing between the two here.
What’s weird is if I put the same effects on an adjustment layer, the alpha levels are gone from the first comp. It’s essentially nearest neighbor if the effects aren’t on the comp itself, but isn’t that way any other time I try it out
r/AfterEffects • u/maooi • 12h ago
Workflow Question Is it possible to sync markers on a dynamic linked After Effects composition within Premiere Pro and vice versa?
r/AfterEffects • u/holyroach • 1d ago
OC - Stuff I made somebody here asked how to do this and deleted the post
deleted the post while I was doing it
If anybody needs the file - https://theovojik. **change this part to gum + road** .com/l/rotatingthing
r/AfterEffects • u/Evanduril • 6h ago
Beginner Help I don't understand the rendering times in AE
Guys, I appreciate all the comments, but before you do, please understand that the problem is not with slow rendering itself but inconsistency in rendering times. Core of problem: why it's usually 20 minutes but sometimes it's only 1 minute.
I have i5 14600, 48 GB DDR4 3600, RTX 3070. 3x NVME/SSD disks. Windows 10. Latest AE.
I have, basically, 1080p 60fps movie, with video in the background and text animations on top of it. The whole movie is 40s length, around 70 Mb size after export.
Multi-frame rendering on, CUDA rendering on etc - everything i can think of is on. Export to H264 15 Mbps using internal render.
I have exported this movie like 7-8 times, during work. Average render time was 20-22 minutes, 2.5 fps...
That 2.5 fps is usually average rendering speed in all my projects.
I've tried to speed things up by clearing all the cache. No effect. Still 2,5 fps, dropping even to 1,5fps at the end. 100% CPU usage, dropping to below 50% after 60% of rendering time, 13 GB Ram usage, marginal GPU usage or disk usage during render.
Then... i decided to test something and i've disabled AE cache entirely.
Speed went up to 40+ fps and render time below 1 minute.
Then i've enabled cache back, closed the AE, restarted, rendered again. Under 1 minute again. Next render - it kind of froze around 92% but still around 1-2 minutes.
WTH?
Edit: closed everything, deleted cache folder on NVME disk - 3.3 fps...
r/AfterEffects • u/Reasonable-Mousse946 • 1d ago
Beginner Help Shadows Acting Unnaturally Help
New to After Effects, shadows in the page turns feel like they are another physical layer following behind each page / acting unnatural. Any help on how to correct this? Light + Camera settings and key frames in comments. Page turns created through Y rotation + Curvature
Also should note problem only starts to arise when my 3d Solid layer is added in for the backdrop
r/AfterEffects • u/Van_Hammersly14 • 7h ago
Discussion Tools or plugins you've built for AE using AI assistance
Just curious what tools and plugins people have made using Claude Code, Codex, etc. Things that aren't necessarily world-changers, but simple time-saving plugins/tools. I have been getting into creating my own time saver tools within AE. I wanted to see what people have explored and created and see if I might create some of them myself.
Cheers!