Adobe After Effects

Smooth animation is important in Adobe After Effects, but perfectly smooth movement isn’t always realistic. When a physical object moves quickly and stops, it often doesn’t simply reach its final position and become completely motionless. It may: overshoot; bounce; spring back; wobble; settle gradually. Motion designers frequently recreate this behavior…

One of the most useful things you can learn in Adobe After Effects is how to create animation that runs automatically. Normally, animation starts with keyframes. You create one value at one point in time, move forward in the Timeline, change the value, and After Effects calculates the movement between…

Repeating animation is one of the most common tasks in Adobe After Effects. A loading icon spins continuously. A button pulses. A background pattern moves forever. A character bounces repeatedly. An arrow moves from left to right again and again. You could copy and paste the same keyframes dozens of…

The wiggle() expression is one of the most useful expressions you can learn in Adobe After Effects. With a single short line of code, you can create: camera shake; floating objects; flickering lights; random movement; subtle text motion; handheld-style animation; organic rotation; animated interface elements. Without expressions, many of these…

Removing a person from the background used to mean hours of manually drawing and animating masks. Adobe After Effects makes this process considerably easier with Roto Brush. Roto Brush lets you identify the foreground subject in a video and then helps propagate that selection through neighboring frames. Instead of manually…

Isolating an object from video has traditionally been one of the most time-consuming jobs in visual effects. A person walks through a scene. A car passes in front of a building. A product rotates on a table. If you want to separate that object from its background, you need an…

Removing unwanted objects from video used to be one of those visual-effects jobs that could require considerable manual painting, masking, tracking, and frame-by-frame cleanup. Adobe After Effects provides a much faster option for many shots: Content-Aware Fill. Content-Aware Fill analyzes surrounding image information and neighboring frames to generate replacement pixels…

Shaky footage can quickly make an otherwise good video look amateurish. Perhaps you filmed handheld while walking. Maybe a lightweight camera introduced small vibrations. Or perhaps a shot that looked stable on the camera display suddenly seems much rougher when viewed on a large monitor. Fortunately, Adobe After Effects includes…

Screen replacement is one of the most practical visual-effects techniques you can learn in Adobe After Effects. You’ve probably seen it hundreds of times without noticing. A person holds a smartphone while an app interface appears perfectly attached to the display. A laptop moves across a desk while a website…

The 3D Camera Tracker is one of the most powerful compositing tools in Adobe After Effects. Instead of tracking a single moving object, the 3D Camera Tracker analyzes the movement of the camera itself and attempts to reconstruct a virtual 3D representation of the shot. That means you can place…