Top 10 Best Effects in Adobe After Effects

so last video we talked about the most underrated effects and in this video i want to talk to you about the best effects and these are effects that if you know how to use all of them you can do pretty much anything that you want to do in after effects and all of these effects they can kind of intertwine and they build off of each other in really cool ways which is what i'm going to try to show you how to do in this video alright so let's get into it so the first one we're going to take a look at is fractal noise my personal favorite so we're going to make a new solid and we'll add fractal noise to it so i'm going to search for fractal noise and i'm using fx console for this little search bar it's a free plugin i'll put a link to it in the description so fractal noise right off the bat just looks like some boring clouds that you can kind of wave through and you know um fractal noise by itself you can uh just make like clouds you could do something like change all of this type to like whatever you know you can make it like strings and change the contrast maybe you add like a like a tint to this and change the colors to blue and a lighter blue and now you're gonna like make some water or something right so off the bat like just playing with fractal noise you can make stuff right but this is not in my opinion the true power of fractal noise the true prep the true power of fractal noise is that it acts like a driver for other effects you use this to power other effects which is what i'm going to show you now so for example let's say i delete this stuff and i'm going to reset this fractal noise what i could do is i could say okay let me change this noise type to something like block and i will bring down the complexity a lot all the way to like one here okay and let me open up the evolution options here and we'll animate the random seed by adding like a time expression time times six something like this okay so now we have like a glitchy pattern something like this and this glitchy pattern we can pair with something else um like a displacement map that will glitch another effect so we'll use this to power a displacement map so this is going to lead me into the next effect displacement map so now in our displacement map comp okay i just made a different looking glitch okay a little kind of scarier one and let's say i want to use this fractal noise here that i made to glitch out this video of this group of nice friends right so what i'm going to do is i'm going to make a new adjustment layer and i'm going to add on a displacement map okay like this and i'll go ahead and i'll hide this displacement we don't need to see it you can even turn it off like this and i'm going to say with this displacement map let's target our displacement which was the fractal noise okay and we'll use the effects because we're the fractal noise was an effect okay so now with this we can say okay well let's animate this over time so we'll start at zero right and then when these friends go in for a hug right here will animate from zero up to like a lot something like this okay so now these friends they start out normal and then they go in for a hug and then they start to get displaced using the values of this displacement something like that so now we could also take this same technique and do something a little less disturbing okay and maybe we'll make a kind of jittery text effect that's like this okay so what we did was using the same technique before we just um animated that fractal noise so we have something like this that's kind of jittering around okay we'll hide that and now we have text here that we want to jitter make kind of like a stop-motion jittery effect and then we apply a displacement over top right like this that is now making that jitter around according to that fractal noise below it get it good all right next up is transform so you know how you have all of these transform properties here well what if you wanted to kind of apply those on either an adjustment layer or on a on a layer property but in a non-destructive way and by non-destructive i mean in a way that's not on this layer or doesn't apply these kind of keyframes here well you could do that if you kind of add a new adjustment layer and then search for the effect transform so now you can do is you could move things around here or scale them up like this and this is now happening with this effect that you could toggle on and off so why is this a really good effect well it's good because let's say you know you have this animation that's happening here but maybe you just want to try it out somewhere else but you already have these keyframes that are happening so you know if you were to um try to move this down it's going to make a new keyframe well if you add a transform effect to it you could just try pushing it down over here and see what that looks like okay and give it a little scale up like this and see how that looks and if you don't like it and you just want to kind of temporarily turn it off you just turn off the effect that does it and now another thing i like to do with transform two is i like to make fake cameras using it so let's say you make um an adjustment layer over everything you could add a transform effect to this like this and you could say well let's wiggle around this rotation by alt clicking on the um stopwatch here and we'll type in wiggle open parentheses and we'll add this expression let's say one times a second comma it's gonna wiggle five pixels like this so now we have this little wiggle that's happening here and this doesn't look really that great because of the contents that's happening here but this can be really good for adding like fake camera movements in your scene without having to actually put in a 3d camera i use this all the time pretty much on on every project echo echo is a crowd favorite and it's super useful for adding like little um trails to your animation to make them a little more interesting so we have this ball bounce that's going to come in what happens if we add an echo to it right so off the bat echo is going to just add in one copy you can see he's editing here and it's adding a uh like a blending mode to it so let's say we change the blending mode to either maximum something like that that will kind of blend um these in i actually don't know what these mean i'm sorry about that should have practiced this um i think mac maximum usually is the one i go to because it doesn't give it a weird blending mode here but um and i'll change the echo time to be something lower like .003 and that will give it a lot less time and then we can just crank up the echo amounts to something like this okay so now we have like this really cool trail that's gonna happen if you do a lot of echoes you get really gets up there it starts to become really intensive on your playback times um so just be aware of that okay this can be really nice here and you can just play around with this time if you hold control while you're scrolling it's going to make the digits smaller all right so you won't have such crazy times but it's probably just going to be easier to get in here and just type these values to be smaller all right you can also play with the starting intensity um to make it like play with this opacity or the decay to make the ending ones uh fade away all right and you might also be familiar that um echo is what i use a lot to make like a really nice warp speed effect you can check out my video on warp speed here also in the link below so i'll use this on a cc starburst effect right so it looks like this but if you if you add an echo effect then it's going to kind of add this drag that happens on your stars and it will add this nice uh warp speed effect will also kill your computer makes it very slow but the effect is really nice so colorama is so powerful and it's also very hard to use but basically if we have something i'll just use fractal noise here right a basic fractal noise and we add colorama to it all right now what colorama is going to do is it's basically going to add color in a according to a certain like parameter so right now it's adding these colors which you can change according to a palette or if you want to type them in here and right now it's adding them to the intensity right so you can see it's kind of adding um green and yellows to where it's black the intensity there and it's adding like dark blues cool colors to where it's white alright and you can phase this to be different to like kind of reverse that right so you could change this to be happening from the alpha which in that case it's it's just going to be solid because this is there's nothing transparent happening here but these different options allow you to do some really unique things with colorama so for example let's say i have a repeater shape like this okay so this is just a circle an ellipse i should say an ellipse that has a repeater with seven copies okay this is how i'm doing this has seven copies they are scaled up all right and the end ones are have opacity at zero so they're fading down so now if i was to add a colorama to this colorama and change this phase to alpha now the outer rings are going to have a different color based on that opacity i have a whole video on colorama and using repeaters to do interesting things so if you want to learn more about this then check out that video link in the description all right slider controls i didn't know if i could technically call this an effect but it's under effects so we're going with it so slider controls are so powerful really all of the um controls are powerful the all of the expression controls are super powerful but we're going to go with slider controls because it's my most used so here's a basic example of what you could do with the slider control let's say you have some text here and let's add a slider control to it you can actually see that slider control is my number one hotkey all right let's add a slider control here now you could do something like if you have something if you have a source text here and you want it to be linked to a slider for numbers well all you have to do then is pick whip this source text to a slider here and now this is linked to this number and it's going to be whatever you want here right and this is animatable because it has a stopwatch like this basic example let's take it up a notch all right so i have all of these leaves that are they're wiggling on this stem right so they all have a basic wiggle expression which is wiggle parentheses um frequency comma amplitude so the amount of times per second it wiggles and then the amount of pixels that it wiggles all right so what if i if i wanted to change all of these it would get really annoying to go in and change each one of these um individually right so what i could do is i could set up a controller layer so i'll make a new null object like this sorry i will do it by right clicking and creating a null object and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to add a slider control let me duplicate it because we need one for each of these to link to we'll call the first one frequency we'll call the second one amplitude right and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to take this first little number here just highlight the number and we will pick whip this to the first slider okay and we'll grab the second number here and pick whip this to the second slider all right now i can do is i will just copy this expression by right clicking on the rotation here copy expression and i will paste it on both of these boom so now they all have the expression so now if i go back to this and i type in whatever i wanted let's say one times a second it rotates five okay now they're all having this expression and i can change them all with this so let's say it wants to happen 20 times a second it wrote it uh wiggles 48 now it's gonna look like this this is a pretty crazy plant whatever maybe it's on like mars or something i don't know actually there's no plants on mars that we know of yet maybe one day but it could be so we can do it everyone and now all of these things are linked to this slider and it's great and you can see how this could be very useful um in a like crazy project all right gradient ramp it uh makes a gradient and it can be really useful when you need a gradient reptile is really awesome when you need to repeat anything so let's say i have a piece of footage and it's just like a little bit too small so i'll add a repetile here and we'll expand this footage out in every direction like this right and i'll change this tiling to unfold right and it looks pretty good you can't really tell that stuff is repeated around the edges now this obviously isn't going to work in every case sometimes like you can kind of see up here that it's mirroring but a lot of times you can get away with it but it's not just good for like repeating footage like this so let's say i have this kind of pattern tile right it's just this tile like this doing this nothing special about it and if i wanted to repeat this pattern across this whole canvas well i'm not gonna just like duplicate it like this each time okay i'm not getting paid hourly for this job okay i gotta get this done quick so what i'm gonna do is i'll add a reptile for this all right and i'll expand this in every direction here up down left right all right tiling for this wouldn't matter because it's gonna be the same no matter what but what i could do is if i wanted to like stagger these in a certain direction what if i did something like i added a a gradient ramp like we learned about before the great gradient ram okay i'll add a gradient ramp here boom and maybe i'll change the ramp to be like more of a diagonal like this all right and we could tell our pattern to get affected by this gradient ramp if we were to add a time displacement onto this layer all right that got affected by the gradient ramp with the effects like this and turn this on okay and so now over time this pattern will be affected by that gradient ramp now if you want to learn more about this technique way more in depth way more in depth i have a longer video about this technique link in the description all right check it out okay next up is set matte okay so let's say i have this like swinging frame here and i wanted all of these trees to be um in the frame like they were painting in this frame okay so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna draw a frame here that covers this all right so this will just be a shape layer boom boom boom boom this stroke does not need to be so aggressive and we'll add a fill to this like that all right great so now what i would do is i would parent this um to the frame right this fill we'll just call this the mat now what you what you might want to do is you would think that you need to duplicate this a bunch of times right so this would be an alpha matte to this and then you duplicate this and you would have an alpha mat here right and you'd have like a ton of alpha matte layers right and this would get really messy really fast but that's not what we're gonna do actually okay so we're gonna have one matte layer and what now what we could do is we could just have an effect oopsie we could have an effect called set matte okay so we're gonna add set matte here and we're gonna target our matte layer and make it effects and mask all right so now where is this layer this is this front tree here so now if we copy this effect and paste it on all of these trees like this they're all going to be cut out by this frame but you can see something weird is happening and it's because this effect only works on rasterized layers so that means that we need to click continuously rasterized for it to work properly or they can be shape layers but since these were imported from illustrator they need to be rasterized so now these are all going to be contained in this frame with just one set matte effect but we're gonna take it a step farther i'm gonna undo all of this okay take the segment off of here because i promised you in the beginning of this video that these effects were gonna build off of each other so what i'm going to do instead is i'm going to make a new adjustment layer like this this is our adjustment layer we're going to add the set matte effect to this layer all right and now with this we're going to set matte with the matte and boom now our set matte effect is going to target the matte and it's going to apply it to everything below it and now you'll see that it doesn't matter if these layers are rasterized or not because it this one does not care because it's an adjustment layer let's take it a step even further shall we let's add a transform effect to this layer now what we could do is we could animate all of these trees and like scale them up through here we probably want to put this above here though so we could like do like a zoom through through the trees we could rotate them boom and they're all getting affected through the set mat since the transform is happening before the set mat needs to happen above it all right so now we can do like whatever we want to scale them up who cares doesn't matter and we can toggle this off and they're back to normal beautiful and finally curves now curves isn't really like the hottest tool but it felt fitting for last because it's really something that i kind of always put on last when i'm working on a project so let's say i have this little video here right you can pretty much always apply curves to like the end of a project or piece of footage to make it just a little more contrasty so what i'll do is i have this piece of footage and i'll kind of pull down and maybe make add a little more value to the black values and i'll pull up here and add a little more to the white value something like this all right so here's with it on here's with it off it just feels like it just adds a little a little bit to it all right basically you just kind of add like a little bit of an s curve to stuff and it just feels like it gives it a little bit more but it's not just for footage okay so curves can also be used for pulling out um extremes so let's say i like add some fractal noise onto this and we um let's say we bump up the contrast here and we'll add like a blur to this like a fast box blur okay let me really blur this up something like that all right now if i wanted to make these forms really solid again like a camo pattern or something well i could add a curves to this you could also do it with levels let's be honest but if i really pulled this stuff to their extremes here like this this would be a way that you could just get like the really only black and white like this right and you could start to get like a cow print or something like this okay and then if i wanted to you know just animate this and i don't know what this is i'm just showing you that you could do this if you wanted to this is a lot of ways to like start the process of getting more interesting looks okay you can blur stuff and then add curves or levels and start to do um interesting things with it okay all right that is all i got for you in this video i hope you liked it and found it helpful let me know what you think is the best effect all right did i miss anything that's on your list or do you agree with mine all right let me know in the comments below and as always thank you for watching the video i hope you liked it and i will see you in the next one goodbye

Channel: Motion by Nick

Views: 7,386

Keywords: after effects, motion graphics, adobe after effects, after effects tutorial, top 10 effects in after effects, after effects transitions, top 10 plugins for after effects, visual effects, video editing, after effects tutorial amv, adobe after effects 2021, after effects tutorial 2021, after effects plugins for edits free, motion graphics after effects, after effects edit tutorial for beginners, visual effects music video, how to animate in after effects for beginners

Id: JVY--0BLgxk

Length: 22min 31sec (1351 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021