
The website has numerous tutorials available that show off the power of After Effects, and teach you how to create those effects, as well. The best way to understand what After Effects can do is to look at some examples. But in fact, you'd use After Effects to build up typically short clips that you then would pull into your video editor as part of your larger project-much like you'd use Photoshop to create a nicely treated image for use in a magazine layout.

To me, the name implies that After Effects is something you apply to your finished video-editing project (the “After” part of the name). The name “After Effects” generated some confusion for me in the past. You can use its motion-tracking capabilities to overlay part of one image with another image-perhaps replacing a road sign in a highway video clip with one of your own making. You can take your green-screen footage and use one of the several impressive chroma-keying plug-ins to key out the backdrop color and composite the result on top of other footage. You can use After Effects' particle effects to generate dust storms, blizzards, and many other cool visual effects. You can generate electrical storms, Star Wars-like Light Saber effects, and even have objects shatter and crumble off the screen.

You can add effects such as shadows, glows, blurs, and many, many others to clips. You can do your typical motion graphics work, causing still images or even footage clips to move around the screen in interesting ways (which many editing applications can do), but they go further by making it easy to have the objects seem to obey the laws of physics.

So, let's begin with what After Effects can do for you.Īfter Effects can be viewed as a special effects system for video editing. When Church Production Magazine asked if I'd be interested in reviewing After Effect that comes with Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5, I welcomed the opportunity to see why so many video editing job requirements include After Effects experience. And given the power of the NLE that I use, I'd wondered if there was a need for it. I've certainly heard of After Effects, but had never used it. I've been doing video production work at various levels for about 10 years, and use a video editing package that does both a good job of editing, but also has numerous features integrated that allow you to do motion graphics, including 3D motion graphics.
