Yeah you can trim some stuff but the editing features aren’t really there compared to Final Cut or Premiere. On top of that, After Effects gives you the very bare bones of features to actually ‘edit’ your clips.
First off, you don’t arrange a movie in After Effects, you don’t do major edits and cuts in After Effects, and you don’t finalize your projects in After Effects. Let me explain why I believe After Effects isn’t a video editor. Whether or not you choose to be picky about terminology is up to you.” – Media College Many people use the term editing to describe all their post-production work, especially in non-professional situations. Editing is usually considered to be one part of the post production process - other post-production tasks include titling, colour correction, sound mixing, etc. “Video editing is the process of manipulating and rearranging video shots to create a new work. For the most part, people do not consider After Effects a video editor even though the literal meaning of video editor means ‘something that edits video’. How do you use expressions in After Effects? Do you have any favorites? Leave aĬomment or let me know on twitter.Well in short, not really, it depends on how you define ‘video editor’. The animation really begins to come to life.
With just aįew additional keyframes and a few tweaks to the variables for each property, We also only animated the position property here,īut you can add this same expression to other properties as well. Is a reference for what changing the different variables will do to yourĪnimation, with the other variables left the same.Īs you can see, you can add a lot of life to your animations with just two
Now you’re free to jump into the code to change how your animation looks. Simply smoothes out the animation and makes it look less jarring. Just click the box below the motion blur icon to enable it for that layer. Playing the animation should look something like the following:įeel free to add motion blur at this point, too. Go ahead and copy and paste the above script, replacing what’s already in theĮxpression input. Should enable expressions on this layer and open a textarea-style field where Next, hold ‘alt’ and left click the stop watch icon next to “Position”. Slow the animation down towards the end, which works well with the inertia This last step is optional, but specifying Easy Ease Out will Right-click on the final keyframe, open the Keyframe Assistant menu, and chooseĮasy Ease Out. Once you’ve created your keyframes, it’s very simple to add an expression. I’ve set up a simple two-keyframe animation where the position is animated, All you’ll need to do isĬopy and paste the following in the right place and edit the variables to change Overshoots its target and “settles” on the final value. Variables for amplitude, frequency, and decay into a sine function that We’ll be working with a popular inertia expression today. , has a lot of additional resourcesįor those that want to dive even deeper into AE. Ground work for what we’ll be going over today.
Great job explaining expressions and how to use them effectively, laying the Lots of expressions exist already, and have for years, but they aren’t alwaysĮasy to find if you aren’t sure what you’re looking for. Prototyping animations, but I’ve found them very helpful when trying to recreateĮffects like inertia or bouncing without specifying a bunch of additional Expressions are by no means a requirement for Rather than acting on the application itself, they define how a property should behave.Īdobe based their expression language on JavaScript, so writing and editing theĬode should also feel very familiar. They’re very similar to scripts you would use on the web, but
If you want to become more familiar with the terms and tools before jumping intoĮxpressions will look pretty familiar to most of the readers that frequent the Through some basics of using and defining expressions, as well as how to modify The designer can animate layers without defining each keyframe by hand. AE comes with support forĮxpressions, which create relationships between layer properties or keyframes so Looking for ways to speed up our workflow. After Effects (AE) is a great tool for prototyping UI animations, but we’re always