I have been using After Effects and my experience was exciting as I explored through the many parts of the app and will tell you if it's worth the price as well. This article is my experience and my opinion, if you have a suggestion, leave one in the comments. This app has endless possibilities where you can make your fantasy scenarios come to life. This will be kind of like a guide for whether you should buy it.
My experience
The app has a very clean and up-to-date UI. It's very well made but it will take some time to get used to it. My use for the app is usually doing edits for my YouTube channel but I also sometimes use it for my school or any other kind of other project media related. This is a perfect way for people who are starting to get into VFX and FX projects. There are a lot of tutorials to help you get started but I would try to avoid depending on tutorials all the time. Tutorials might be good at the beginning but once you keep depending on it, you won't learn.
If you are doing edits related to transitioning and graphing, this app is perfect for you. It's very simple to use for those purposes but if you want to add 3d items to your video, prepare to invest a lot of time as it could take hours to even days. I recommend buying After Effects and some other software in bundles as it is cheaper and you have more features. My bundle is a student one because it is a good discount and could also be used for school for tech apps or any class like that.
Editing and Graphing
Graphing is pretty easy in After Effects as you can start graphing by using F9 to easily ease the keyframe you are graphing and hit the graphing button to start graphing. This can be used for zooms, slides, shakes, and other transitions like that. While I'm talking about transitions a cool way to do them is putting your two values at the beginning and the end of the clip and try to graph it as fast as you can to make that cool and non-stale zoom. I try not to make the zoom as fast on those fast 5 or 10-frame clips but for the 15 and 20-frame ones, that makes some smooth transitions.
Shakes are easy to do if you have the right resources. I typically use Twitch as it is a good option but you can use Sapphire or any other plugin to make shakes. The key to making a good shake/twitch is to not make it last too long and has to fit the song (like a beat drop or any heavy beats) If you're doing shakes and twitches on a slow love song, it would feel out of place and wouldn't fit the vibe. I would recommend doing it on more extreme pop songs and rap songs (or maybe phonk, if anyone uses that) If you can't get any plugins or don't want to risk getting a virus (if you know, you know) just use position to different areas of the screen and add motion blur and motion tile to the clip
Well, there's the CC(color correction) as well, I don't use any plug-ins because of the simplicity of the normal effects and
because I get the same look even if I try the plug-ins, I usually use some sharpening, but not too much, the quality will look like a potato if you add too much sharpening. Then add some brightness and contrast, and make it pop. You can do whatever you want to do, I usually mess with the colors but if that's not your cup of tea, that's fine.
Finally, there are effects, probably the most unique and complicated yet easy part of editing. Find your style and it's ok to use other styles for the time being, but if you want to master someone else's style, go for it. I usually use outlines, particle effects from overlays, and some flares and glows. Outlines are pretty easy to do because all you have to do is find edges, click the tick on the invert, use tint, and then use glows and 4-color gradients to color it. You can make glows like a light glow or an extreme glow. It varies for any style like a tiktok style or a professional style.
Conclusion
After Effects is an amazing platform that offers a wide variety of opportunities with every single style. There is an array of jobs you can fulfill and a surplus of content you could make. I hope you learned something new that could help you from my experience.
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