The Adobe suite offers two tools for video composition. Premiere is the  primary workhorse (and the software I have been using to date) and After Effects, which, I gather, was initially introduced to add effects after the main work was done—hence the name. Like all mature software in this fast changing age, the lines between packages has begun to blur and it seems one can do most simple projects in either Premiere or After Effects and there is no obvious (to a beginner) distinction or clear workflow; most searches conclude with a definite: it depends…

The following is my first attempt to work in After Effects. which on the surface use a very different work paradigm. The clip tests out a few of the plugins and methodologies and tries to use the AE workflow. The outcome isn’t as smooth because there are way more options to fiddle with and I am ignoring most of the fine tuning, but it looks like I will have much more fine control over animations and effects once I get the hang of it.

Also, as far as I can tell, AE allows you to import layered files from Photoshop and Illustrator. This means I can set up separate animated elements in the original .ai file rather than having to export each separate element in its own file as I did when doing the original animations in Premiere—huge time saver.

There is no audio and I fiddled to try and get a poster frame in there, so the initial screen didn’t look blank.

 

And getting silly with 3D…