New Workflow Plug-in: FX CONSOLE! 100% Free

okay hey what's up Andrew and Kramer here videocopilot dotnet and welcome back to another very exciting tutorial today we're going to be taking a look at our new workflow plugin for After Effects called effects console now this plugin doesn't create cool 3d graphics and titles like element 3d but you know I have to go get that every time I do a new take ok and it doesn't really create cool energy effects like saber but sometimes just being able to work faster inside of After Effects makes a big difference like imagine if you had four arms it would look kind of weird but think about how much work you could get done alright so let's go and check it out alright so to be honest this plugin was designed around things I wanted to be able to do in After Effects small things that would just help me stay focused on what I was doing and over time we built these utilities into the plugin so the way it works is that you select a layer and you hit a shortcut key and it brings up the effects console toolset what we can do here is we can type in effects or presets and we can just hit enter and apply them directly we can type just the part of the effect name we can use the arrow keys we can even use the mouse and what this allows you to do is quickly apply effects directly to any layer so for example I can just go through and add the effects that I need now the nice thing about this is that it saves you time and lets you focus on exactly what you're doing now as much as I like going through menus or using the effects preset search which is nice but you still have to click and you have to drag it out or double-click on it there's just a lot of clicking I like to use the keyboard as much as possible now if you've used cinema 4d or blender or nuke they have a similar menu system that allows you to apply nodes and effects directly so you know how much time you can save milliseconds that's time you could be spending with your family but in all seriousness sometimes having to search for that effect can sometimes disrupt your focus and get you off track and since we've been working on this plugin we've even seen some other After Effects scripts that allow you to search through effects but what it really told me is that I wasn't the only one that was sick and tired of going through menus all the time you know I just realized it's a lot like the Nintendo Power glove the power glove for your NES now you and the games and just improves your experience except it's cool like the one in Minority Report hey wait a second that guy kind of looks like Tom Cruise power glove alright so now that you have a basic idea on how this works let's go and take a look at how we can customize it for your specific needs all right so here's a pretty simple project I want to do a corner pin on this video game footage and put it on my video screen console so we'll just type in the shortcut control space in this case and we'll type in the corner pin and there it is I can hit enter and I can work with this but here's the thing the corner pin effect is actually kind of an older effect I prefer to use an effect called power pin so type in power pin CC power pin apply that this is a lot nicer because I can move two points at once and you know this is a lot more options but the problem is I don't always remember power pin I think corner pin so here's what you can do you can right click on power pin add to favorites then go into the settings and I have the power pin effect here I can add an alias so if I click here I can type in corner pin hit OK and by the way you can change the UI color and you can also change the shortcut so in this case you hold down control then hit space and that will bring up the effects console so I'll go ahead hit OK and now if I type in corner pin power pin actually shows up and then I can hit enter but what's even better than that is I can type in corner pin right click on the old corner pin effect and just blacklist it and now it doesn't even show up in the results so this just makes it a little bit easier to focus on exactly what you want to do alright so what's cool about this is that you can really begin to customize the search Souls based on the way that you use After Effects so for example if I type in Ellie I can see leave color pop up but maybe I really think levels should be more important so I can right click add to favorites and now levels is going to pop up a little bit quicker what about a radial blur now radial blur this is the old radial blur it's got a little bit of noise it's not really as good as the CC radial blur so what if we just come down here right click on CC radial blur add to favorites and maybe we'll take the old one and we'll blacklist it and over time you can really customize the results and get it to be as streamlined as possible okay let's go and take a look at another cool feature what I'll do is create a new solid and I'll hit OK and I want to apply a fractal noise so I'll hit control space I will type in fractal now this brings up the fractal affect which is like Mandelbrot's and cool things like that but not usually the effect you want to apply so let's do fractal noise and we'll just add this as a favorite which will bring it to the top and by the way once you get a few favorites in there you can actually reorder them which will help set the priority so head okay so we'll type in fractal noise and we'll apply it now I don't love the default settings so what if you wanted to change the default settings of a specific effect one effect that you always tend to change so let's say I come in here and I set this to dynamic and I invert it and I like to set that complexity to ten and maybe the scale to 150 and this is my go to settings well what I can do is use the built-in effects presets saving capability so here's what I'll do I'll select the fractal noise come over here click on the save FX preset and we'll type in fractal noise default and I'll hit save then I'll just delete this effect control space go into the settings and here I have the fractal noise and I can also put an override so if I click right here and I can start typing in the name and so here it is fractal noise default the one I just created I'll click it and now that is set as the override so if I hit OK I can now type in fractal noise and it's set with those specific settings so this can be a really handy way especially with effects that you are always changing to a different default and of course keep in mind that effects presets can also include multiple effects and even expressions so I could add an expression to the evolution may be alt click do time times 250 and this creates an animation effect I could even add an unsharp mask which I like to do with my fractal noises just to sharpen them up a bit and if I really wanted to I could do a color vibrance which is another Video Copilot plugin that should be favorited come on and let's hear color vibrance now I'm not saying this is what you want to do just saying this is what you can do so now if I select each one of these effects I can come over here to the effects and presets click Save and we'll just overwrite the fractal noise default hit save replace it in this case and if I just delete all these effects here I can apply the fractal noise and it will apply it from that effects and preset file so this will definitely save you some time alright what else can we do here tell you what let's go into the settings and let's take a look at our shortcuts so the shortcuts is basically a quick way to apply any effect or preset so maybe you want to put element 3d in here and you can change the label to III D maybe you want to put Sabre maybe your boss likes the page peel effect and he wants that to be applied to everything and you want to be quick with it now you'll notice a number next to the name of the effect and these are the shortcut numbers one through nine that you can assign so if we hit OK we can bring up the menu control space and you can see that one two three we can apply any one of these effects directly and instantly just by hitting the number one two or three all right so let's say the boss comes in he wants the page term so we'll bring up the menu hit the number three and bam we are turning the page on this design let's say for example that you want a specific color correction so let's type in curves what you can do is right click and replace a shortcut or create a shortcut so if you create a shortcut it'll just add it to the list so maybe noise add a shortcut create a shortcut and that's in the number five slot so here we go five and we're in business maybe glow should be there and again you could come up with your own system on how these are organized you can also reorder them in here and get them to work exactly how you want and of course customize the label now we did limit it to just nine shortcuts so that you only have to push a single number key now we do have a premium version of effects console with ten shortcuts and it's $60,000 oh and by the way there is a dockable panel called effects console that you can just stick wherever you want just lets you quickly get to the other functions now speaking of the other functions effects console is not just about managing your effects it's also about managing your design progress so here's a few features we've built in to help you with that so first of all there's ability to copy to clipboard save to P&G so I can just click in here and maybe copy to clipboard then I can just come over here to Photoshop and choose edit paste and there's my design but here's the thing I don't usually like to leave after-effects I like to work inside of After Effects so we created our own gallery in effects console so we can just click on the gallery here open it up and this allows you to go through the screenshots that you've made now the nice thing about this is that it's a fully customizable window that you can open scale up and it works inside of After Effects now it's not a dockable window because it's always going to stay on top and more importantly we didn't want to lose some of the functionality of it being a dockable panel alright so let's go and take a look at a few of the things that we can do now first of all where do these screenshots come from well let's say that we come over here and we add a few effects and what we can do is we can click on the snapshot button for effects console or we can bring up the menu and click on the snapshot button here and what it'll do is take a screenshot of the comp at the current resolution so then if we open up the gallery will see that snapshot in our list here are some of the different things you can do and some of the different things I use this for first of all it's nice to be able to see the progress or to see the direction of your design you can also use the up and down arrow keys and it's just really nice to be able to compare design so you can hold down shift select multiple designs and just sort of compare them and maybe get a feel you can open up this window a bit give you some space you can select up to four designs and check those out you can hit the Z key and that will zoom in to full resolution so this one is less resolution when I took the screenshot you can delete them here we can also right click and open in Explorer and this will give us direct access to the files this works almost like a catalog of things that you can then copy later so sometimes you want to have more than one snapshot so let's say I want to take this I can right click beat a clipboard jump back into Photoshop and paste this into my comm so it's a nice way to be able to keep multiple buffers going now keep in mind this isn't meant as a permanent location for your files so you want to make sure you're backing things up or saving them into other directories as you go because this is definitely just a temporary directory all right a few other cool things you can do you can select multiple export them or select multiple and delete them we can size the window down size the thumbnails down and here's like kind of a nice thing is that and you can kind of see I just have some random you know designs and just kind of seeing the progress or just taking screenshots that I can paste later sometimes it's helpful just to see the progress of your design work and basically how it's getting worse and then you know to take a break and then you come back and you just turn the computer off and give up another cool thing about this is just being able to compare design ideas so you're not so sure and you want to be able to just kind of look at how they compare to each other so I can hit Z let's see you know I did some weird stuff here did some different stuff here and you know you're just not sure which one is really singing for you so it's nice sometimes to be able to see things relative to other designs the main thing is that it works right inside of After Effects now this next feature is going to blow your mind oh whoa this is amazing no but seriously what's cool about this is that we can move this over to the side for example and maybe we could use the tint effect to sample a color that we want to try out and this is nice because it actually accesses the real color so maybe you have some cool color swatches or maybe you're doing a shot with a muzzle flash and you just want to match the look of the muzzle flash across multiple projects this can be a really useful way to keep consistency as you work oh and here's another really cool feature so I can either move this out of the way onto my other screen I'll just close it for now what I can do is solo a layer with an alpha transparency background and I can just screenshot this go into my menu and check it out I've got a screenshot with an alpha Channel but what's even cooler than that is that you can actually take an alpha Channel and import it back into your project directly by just dragging it into the project and it's just nice to be able to try stuff out really quickly and bring assets back in just to see if they're going to work without having to create a bunch of files on your desktop all right so this tool is really about helping you stay focused and helping streamline your experience inside of After Effects all right well I hope you guys find this plug-in useful we're really hoping that this is a platform in the beginning of even more cool weird odd features that help make your After Effects experience better this is version 1 of FX console and we've already got some really great ideas on how we can add to this and build on this platform and as always this is a community driven project and we couldn't do it without your guys support I love that we're able to create free high-quality plug-ins for after effects users like Sabre and color vibrance and many others all we ask is that if you're looking to upgrade your After Effects game check out element 3d check out motion pulls for some really cool sound effects we've got some great model packs and stock footage we really appreciate it alright guys thanks so much for watching I'm Andrew Kramer for Video Copilot dotnet and we will see you next time once it is how you get fired up just um you know it's empty it's like a premium Sega like a Sega CD or a Dreamcast or you know except it doesn't suck I found this in an old box I actually only meant to keep the box effects console is kind of like an expansion it's like a rumble pack mixed with a game genie jr. does this kind of date me a little bit my kids played this growing up now this isn't a fancy plug-in like element 3d for doing cool 3d graphics no oh shoot

Channel: Video Copilot

Views: 608,559

Keywords: after effects, workflow, script, speed

Id: rqmDo04T0pY

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

God fucking bless Andrew Kramer. Dear lord. He's basically picking up the slack of Adobe.

[u/sedukai]

and i just bought Quick Menu for $25 haha shit

[u/[deleted]]

I know this is an AE subreddit, and Video Copilot is a literal god around here (rightfully so) -- but is there a site / guy like him for Photoshop?

I love AE, but honestly spend more of my day-to-day in photoshop and I'd love some handy tools like this.

[u/mikeoley]

Andrew Kramer just straight up fucks. This is such an amazingly awesome useful plugin. Thank you thank you!

[u/pixelbath]

Nice. Adobe could take a few cues from third-party addon writers to see what to work on next, instead of just picking random features to pile on top.

[u/camboramb0]

My god, this is amazing!

[u/Handarand]

I fucking hated so much to render as jpeg or png 1 frame from big project, now it's in matter of seconds. This only feature is an insane time saver for me.

[u/s0phocles]

Ah man I was SO hoping he was going to double click one of those saved preview snapshots and it was going to revert all the adjustments in the composition to that previous frame.

[u/jayisforjelly]

This is just the nicest thing anyone has ever done for a community of artist! Dear lord, Andrew Kramer is a Saint, I guess I should finally go buy element 3D