Adobe After Effects

Note : This page has been translated into English from French by a machine translation tool

Editing a video will allow you to remove unwanted sequences from your shots, rework the sound or integrate images. To do this, you can choose Adobe Premiere Pro, which should give you a serious helping hand. Why not take it a step further ? Why not decide to incorporate special effects or insert 3D objects into your camera shots, for example, to produce a more elaborate and personalized sequence. Interested ? Well, that’s good, because we’re going to talk about Adobe After Effects…

Adobe After Effects is a graphics animation, composition, and visual effects software included in the Adobe Creative Cloud software suite. It was created in 1993 and was originally more dedicated to video editing. You can purchase a monthly or annual subscription to take advantage of After Effects only if you don’t want access to the other software in the suite. The software is available for your computer whether it runs on Windows or macOS.

In order to understand how it works, it is possible to make an analogy with Adobe Photoshop. Indeed, it is based on the same principle of using layers (see our article Adobe Photoshop for more information) but adapted to video. After Effects allows you to combine images, videos or apply effects and modify the characteristics of certain elements of the image that you have selected. You can also animate the modification of these characteristics. For example, if you want to change the transparency of a text overlay element, you could do this permanently so that it remains constant over time, but you could also, for example, over a set period of time, decide to make your element more and more transparent until it disappears.

But After Effects goes much further by giving you the possibility to integrate characters, insert titles, logos and even 3D objects in your scene and then put them in motion. The principle of integrating 3D objects in space is based on motion tracking, also called match moving. The principle is simple. After Effects will analyze the movements of the camera on a video sequence by analyzing the movement of a large number of points on the image allowing you to associate these movements to the 3D element you want to insert in order to visually integrate it into the scene with optimal realism. For sequences with parasitic camera movements, you can use the stabilization tool to make your video sequence more stable and enjoyable to watch.

The integration of Adobe Sensei artificial intelligence technology (see our article on Adobe Sensei, artificial intelligence to serve creation for more information), allows you to quickly remove elements or subjects from a video clip. The content-based fill function analyzes the image to study the object’s environment, uses it as a basis for expanding the area on the object to be removed, and duplicates the operation across all images in your video clip.

But let’s not forget that After Effects is part of a software suite and its perfect integration into it will allow you to import compositions prepared with Adobe Premiere Pro but also all kinds of projects from Photoshop, Illustrator or XD. The popularity of the software in its field also allows you to have access to a large number of extensions in order to extend its functionalities, such as those offered by Video Copilot for example, as well as to benefit from compatibility with a wide range of partner applications.

As with the majority of its programs, Adobe provides a set of tutorials on its site, classified by level, to help you as a beginner to progress extremely quickly in the mastery of the software but also to improve or learn new tricks if you are already an expert.

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