5 Amazing After Effects Tools - Speed Up Your Workflow!

hi I'm Ryan summers one of the creative directors here at school of motion and I've been using After Effects for almost 20 years on things like title sequences VFX for feature films and yes even Voltron in my time using After Effects I've come across a lot of tools but here are five of my favorite that you may not have heard of [Music] when you start going into third-party plugins and scripts it can be a really mind-bending experience so I'm here to show you some of the plugins and scripts you may not have heard of we're not talking about element 3d or particular or Stardust let's take a look at five tools that talk about key frames compositions timelines the project panel and one tool that'll help you work a lot faster we know in After Effects the lifeblood of all animation is keyframes and if we watch this we can see that there are tons of keyframes in here let's just say if we wanted to we could go in and we want to adjust the left foot being able to move back and forth between keyframes is pretty straightforward if you hold on shift you can snap to keyframes as you move that current time indicator back and forth and if you hold down alt and you're working with a slower rig or a slow character to compute that'll keep the interface for refreshing which allows you kind of scrub back and forth pretty easily the nice thing is you can still see the controllers move back and forth so if I go to another keyframe and I'd let go of the mouse the character will update so that's kind of a fast way to kind of move around with things but what we really do as animators is we move back and forth we flipped we try one keyframe we go to the other one we'd see what the difference is so in After Effects the keyboard shortcut for doing that is J and K and it's pretty straightforward it's nice to be able go back and forth between us but one thing I've always wondered about was I really want to be able to just bounce back and forth between specific keyframes on a specific track of a specific object so let's say the left foot and the position it's highlighting all of these keys right now wouldn't it be great for After Effects for it to know that you know what I really want to do is if I hit K I shouldn't go to the next keyframe that's visible I should be bouncing back and forth to the ones that are selected so that's where the smart keyframe Navigator comes in from a scripts it's really simple it's two scripts that you install and then you can apply keyboard shortcuts I have shift C and shift feed to go to previous keyframe or next keyframe and you saw me going back and forth of J and K and I'll do it again really quickly like let's look at how many key presses it is to get to the next keyframe that I want one two three three key frames but even to get all the way to the end 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 you're spamming the K button or spamming the J button just to get back and forth from the set of keyframes that make up your cycle now let's roll back to the beginning and this time I'm gonna use viii and look at that you can notice if you just watch it down here I hit shift seen it just bounces back and forth between the keyframes that I have selected so that makes it really easy to go and flip back and forth the two are my poses which is what animating is all about right I don't need to see all the breakdowns but if you think about it when you're animating how many times you pressing K and J you could reduce those a ton another little great thing about this is that it doesn't have to be just a specific track but if you're looking at all of these different keyframes for all these different controllers and you want to just focus on things for a layer let's say it'll do the same thing if I hit shift C it'll ignore any of the keyframes and no happened right here you'd think it would stop right here but if I hit shift C yeah you can orso's so it's kind of intuitive that's why the smart and smart key from navigator actually is true it's smart enough to know what you're looking at and you reduce the amount of times you have to hit those shortcut keys how often have you opened up one of your old files or inherited a file from someone else and as you scroll through you realize it's a complete mess and the folders no naming conventions no organization no sense of the project or the flow of the project that's contained within it but what if I told you that there was a script that was the press of one button could not only create folders but also take your comps pre comps in your assets and put them in the right place well that's what declutter from AE scripts does for you so let's get into this master come I want to see what my flow actually looks like so there's a really easy way to do that you can use composition flowchart and yes After Effects does have a way to view your project nota lis it's great it's not necessarily a nodal compositor but you've got to think of it more like it's a nodal organizational tool if you think of it that way and you change a couple of presets it's actually super powerful now if you've done this before like me you kept plus and all of a sudden it feels like there's this rainbow-colored spaghetti mess that you just have no idea what to do with it but if you go to the filters and you actually turn off the footage solids and layers as well as the effects and I like to switch flow direction from top to bottom to right to left and all of a sudden have something that mimics a lot of what I do when I'm working my time lines at my main comp and then I have all my pre comps kind of cascading to the right you can also change it from the kind of these spaghetti noodles to these straight arm connectors and also you have this really clean workflow there's a lot of great things in here so if you click something it automatically syncs to your project window there's also a little tip you know how After Effects works every you right-click it really depends on what your right-clicking over there's all these extra tools here that give me a couple options that aren't even down in my menu so I can justify left and it's even a little bit cleaner if I have you know nodes all over the place I can right-click and say clean up and it automatically pops into place but what's really great is I can start to see my project flow in a way that didn't make sense before that right and what's also great is you can see these rainbow colors you notice over here I actually have the label color column all the way to the left and I use that as an organizational tool now you're probably used to sorting by name but did you know you can actually sort by label color now right now that doesn't make much sense because everything's randomly applied intuitive colors but I can actually start applying my colors really easily here and if you take a look at the left all of a sudden it pops up to the top I'm gonna take this next layer of comps deep I can turn this red all of us and they start cleaning up and you can go on and on and this is why I like to have for my own kind of set of colors in my labels so I know I'm going amber and then at the bottom I'm going to yellow you can see here Wow look at that all of a sudden this makes some sense just so you know you can go to edit preferences and labels and you can change these colors in the names so I like to use magenta as the kind of like call out and I go from these warm colors all the way down to these cool colors and again that's what happens is and when you right-click here it matches the order you have in your preferences so I have something that's a little bit ordered and structured now if I go to the declutter window you can see there's just three or four buttons these are custom folder organizations that I made and if I hit on spring-cleaning the Edit window you can actually start to see as I scroll through here this is what I want my default folders to look like so I've got render I've got comps and pre comps I've got my assets with subfolders for all of my assets and if you look over here and this kind of light gray you can start to see that some of these actually have names so something like images if I click on it declutter comes with this preset sorting option so you can tell a folder to automatically fill it with compositions pre comps you can use prefixes and suffixes or extensions which are super powerful and then audio video and image and solids so we can look here this is pretty straightforward for me for my organization if I hit cancel now what I want to do is just watch over here in the project window if I hit spring-cleaning it'll save and in a matter of seconds all of that mess all the sudden gets organized into a very understandable repeatable project window organization if I look into my assets I can see that it respected the fact that I had a Photoshop folder with all those layers they're still there it maintained that but then I go into my images all the images are there my video my bread files there and if I go to the pre-comp what's really cool is that if I'm still sorting by color you can see that the pre comps are there and they're maintaining that order versus if we were sorting this way and I went into my pre comps it's just kind of this mess of color and mess of names I don't really know what that is but if I go out and sort here the great thing is not only does it sort by color but it still respects the fact that they're inside a folder it doesn't reorganize these folders so very quickly you can see how the power of something like declutter kind of almost feels like magic true comp duplicator it's an oldie but a goodie and it's perfect for things like lower thirds sports graphics broadcast packages but the coolest thing I could think of to show off this script is to introduce you to my buddy axel Danger sin' he's a fully rigged do a character but I want him to have a rival and I think I'm gonna make his rival his evil twin brother laser ray Burton so really what I need to do is make a duplicate of his composition and all the pre comps and it's not as easy as it sounds I could go to axel duplicate him call him laser and just drag him over but as you would guess if I jump in there to that pre-comp it's still the axle rig so if I was to grab his center of gravity move him down and go back to that main scene you can see both rigs have moved which makes a lot of sense they're both sourcing the same rig so if I undo that move and delete that laser comp the next best thing I could do is go to the axe or I can duplicate that right so I can have an axle rig you rename him laser and let's just change the color to something like blue and if I add him into the scene make him 3d let's scale them down to 50% we can have these two twin brothers face off and you'd think if I double-click in here I have my own rig separate from axel I can grab his hips and get him into a fighting stance if I jump back out to the scene you can see two separate characters two separate poses but what happens if I want to change his face right now Laser smiling quite a bit and I don't think that's his character so if I go into the laser rig and I take a look at his face if I grab that head controller and go to the effect controls you can see we have a bunch of controls I ability to flip the head left and right I can control his mullet and then I also have this mouths letter that if I hit 50 I should have a wide-open mom but I don't if I went to Axl's rig and I picked his head and went to Ma select he changes and sadly if I go to the laser rig so does laser so we have some controls that we can make individual but things like the props or the mouth controls they don't work and to figure out why we should really go back to our composition flowchart I told you a thing was gonna be handy it's actually worth it if you have a second monitor just leave a flowchart open just to see what happens to your scene as you start building it out so let's hop on into the composition flowchart and let's control click and we can see what we've got I have the laser ring I have the axial rig but you can see they're both pointing to the same pre comps and then the nested pre comps even further and what those happen to being the mouths comp the prop rump so what's the next best step well that's for true comp duplicator comes in handy I want to go ahead and delete my laser rig which you can do from the cops lo I'm gonna select my axial rig and then if we go to window there's a little trick here that normally you can scroll down you can click on the button but it seems really jumpy one thing you can do is if you know the script that you're getting ready to call up just hit the first letter and you can see as I hit T I start scrolling through really quickly and there's true comp duplicator you can hit enter I'm gonna make a new comp dupe and I'm gonna search for any where it says axle I'm going to replace with layer so my axle rig is gonna be laser rig I'm gonna group all the items that make so all the pre comps that comps everything's gonna go into this folder so it's easy for me to find and the biggest one here is to update the expression so that they're no longer linked to that same source from axle it's pretty straightforward I hit duplicate selected it'll take a second for it to happen and when it's done you can see there are 17 items duplicated all the expressions updated which is amazing I hit OK there's my laser rig I actually have the main comp for laser and I have all my pre comps which is great and I'm just gonna go ahead and do the same thing we did before I make this purple and I'm gonna pull him out and put him into my comp folder and then I'm gonna grab him and drop him into that scene so the same thing we did before we make him 3d we scale him 50% and we set him ready to do battle now here's the real test let's go back to our flow chart and you can see there's something different so if I control click on the plus you know also see that there's a lot more cops here I'm gonna pull these out and you can see we switch from axle because the renaming I'm gonna just go ahead and change my color and you can see here as well those all-important pre comps came along for the ride let's go to my laser rig and if I grab the head and I go to my effects controls let's try something like 40 so there's a small mouth that's changing now if we hit axle rig they're both different they're individuals so now not only can we change our poses we can change our face shapes we can change our prop selection and we have a completely new hierarchy you can imagine where if you're doing sports graphics and you have a main company you need to swap out multiple things team logos a background plate new type but really when you talk about characters and you talk about all these nested compositions where there are expressions going back and forth true comp duplicator is one of the best tools you can have in your back pocket so smart key from navigator is amazing that lets us be able to move back and forth quickly between the keys that we want to move between but is there a tool that lets us work with layers and a quick and intuitive fashion just like smirky from navigator well the answer kind of is yes so I have to confess I love axle dangerous and so much I had to bring him back to show off a script called lazy 2 and in this sequence it's essentially his title reveal let's take a look well we've got axle but we're enough a title so this is again a great place for us to show you how to use lazy 2 and here we actually have an example but it's pretty flat and it's pretty boring and what I'd really love to do is much in the same way that flow allows us to play with Easons and ease outs for keyframes I want to use lazy 2 to allow me to do the same thing but for layers it's essentially a staggering tool it's a way to be able to take a collection of layers and offset them in time so it's really straightforward but it's super powerful I can just basically go and grab the first letter and the last letter and using this this is my end point mi out point for the entire animation I can actually select a preset and let's just use a maximum ease but pull that back and maybe just have a little bit of ease at the beginning and what these that come out fairly fast and they want them to cushion at the end so it's really straightforward right now I have a bunch of layers selected and I can assign how many frames I want this actual stagger to happen let's say it's something like 15 and I just hit the plus sign and let it go to town and you can see it took the order of the letters that I selected and it applied a nice kind of curved across the entire selection based on what my eases are so let's go ahead just ran preview that and see what it looks like like that's pretty nice just to start off with but what if I want to have it come out from the center that's just as easy all I have to do is select them in the order that I want and after that let's try having a bigger slam out and look at that it's super easy to go and try different staggers and if you ever run into a problem it's pretty straightforward to just reset everything you just have to hit the reset button so the cool thing about this is it actually works on keyframes as well so if I go to the project window and I hit you to expose all my keyframes all I have to do is just go and drag all my keys in the order that I want and then if I go back to lazy let's go and select something a little bit different let's say I want to you ease out from the beginning and slam at the end but then I also have this extra row it this allows me to pinch the keyframe so it's almost another dimension of staggers and I'm gonna go ahead and say I want to pinch out and I get this controller that shows how the graph is gonna change over time and let's say let's make this over 15 frames and hit enter it's gonna take a few seconds to think about it but then once it's all done look at this it has this incredible curve that I don't know how long it would take to actually make this by hand but it would take a lot longer than what it just showed it's gonna let it play and you can see it's a really nice set of animation that again there can be some tweaks but maybe you want to say I can say you know what let's go ahead and select all those keyframes again and just reset it and maybe I won't make it so extreme you can see it snaps back in a place really quickly pull some of the ease out and then as I select all my keyframes again I get those pinched options maybe I'll pull back on the pinching a little bit and maybe I'll make it 22 frames just to have a little bit more time for the pinching to occur and you can see what you got now it's a little bit easier but look how fast it is to just go ahead and try different staggers it's be able to do that on your own when you're moving them but take so much time that you would even consider really doing it so again this is a case of one of those plugins that the name is kind of really actually the opposite of what it does lazy to doesn't really make you lazy it actually makes you a little bit more adventurous in exploring different animation styles for this last script a one share a Productivity booster that's great when you have very heavy effects tax or really anything that slow to scrub through or preview in after-effects and I want to show you it with this file from VFX promotion and it's a perfect candidate because it's got animated elements stock explosions high-resolution red footage still photography and that plasma bolt from trapcode particular it's deceptively simple but when you see the effects stack you understand why it's so slow to render now what is the script that we're talking about it's got a strange name believe me it's called render hogs but just stay with me here for a second once you see what I can do with just a few button presses you can see how you can have a boost to your workflow and you'll be wanting to reach for it a lot more often so I have this crazy particle effect I don't need to figure out what this design looks like at the first stage of approvals I really just need to know where is it aimed how long is it gonna be on-screen and where does it end and I don't need to do that with something in particular I can do that with something like Bing and Bing is so light and so fast to work with it's basically just a starting point and ending point and then you animate the length in time to create what ends up being a really silly and straightforward lookin laser blast but it answers those questions and I'm still not worried about the final look but I can say I think this is how fast they're gonna move this is what the follow-through will be this is how gravity works or turbulence and again when I get that approved then I can start working on the designs and there I really just start working on a single still firm and that's where we start adding each of these elements a fast box blur a levels to tighten it up the magic touch of cc-vector blur to kind of create this electrical kind of pulse real smart motion blur to kind of just smooth everything out and then colorama over the top of it to give it that kind of plasma feel and then all those things together working in stages gives you this but I will warn you this takes a long time to preview so if I've designed one of these I don't really want to have to see it preview over and over and over all the time every time I scrub through if there's a change anywhere in frame it's gonna have to be refreshed but I really do want to know what the timing is like in context let's say I have another plasma bolt or I have to do that energy shield I want to know where this is going to be and I could really rely on that beam effect that I had at the beginning the only problem is every time I need to go back and forth do I really want to have to press turning on the beam turning off all the other facts and the remember where all of my other effects are out on my other layers no that's where render hugs comes in and I'll tell you right off the bat that the interface is not that spectacular but it's got it where it counts so what if I told you I could turn on all these effects again turn off beam I can essentially tag these and call them render hogs you can see all it's really done so far is just add this little prefix in front bow then what if I grab the beam and I called it a substitute it adds another little prefix and if all of a sudden I say disabled hogs my beams back and that might not seem like a big deal but think how many times you'd be pressing on and off of these effects and then let's say we have eight different effects across one shot but then imagine we have six shots and each one of those has eight effects in one button press once it's set up you essentially can create groups and toggle these groups on and off super easy the great thing about this is that at render time if you've been working with the Hogs off all you have to do is toggle and render it'll switch everything back to the Hogs the beautiful slow to render effects all turn on at once and it'll send up a render queue so that way you can see how much of a boost this could be to your workflow SmartKey navigator declutter true cop duplicator lazy 2 and render hogs five tools for After Effects that make your life easier and I bet they'll start you off and exploring for more tools like these make sure to check out school emotion for more tips subscribe to the YouTube channel and I'll be seeing you soon [Music]

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 59,787

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph, after effects tutorial, adobe after effects, speed up, after effects workflow tutorial, adobe illustrator, after effects workflow tips, speed up after effects, after effects workflow, adobe after effects (software)

Id: Uk8qTZQZ5rs

Length: 19min 47sec (1187 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020