About After Effects Club

After Effects Club is an independent guide to Adobe After Effects for people who animate, key and export their own work and want a project they can still follow at the next revision. I'm Ethan Brooks, and I write it around one question: will this composition still make sense when you reopen it to change something? A nicely eased animation can sit inside a very confusing project, and the confusion only shows when a title changes or a client asks for another version.

What the guides cover

• Getting started: which jobs belong in After Effects and which in Premiere Pro, how the two apps pass work back and forth through Dynamic Link, Motion Graphics templates and rendered masters, and which one to learn first.
• Animation and expressions: easing keyframes with Easy Ease and the Graph Editor's speed and value graphs, and the wiggle expression, from a one-line shake to sliders on a null that start, stop and loop it.
• Effects, presets and templates: finding effects in the Effects & Presets panel, bringing back one that has gone missing, building fades, wipes, slides and zooms by hand, and saving a transition as your own preset.
• Timeline, layers and audio: splitting, trimming and slipping layers, lifting or extracting a range, finding cuts with Scene Edit Detection, and scaling footage to fill the frame.
• Keying, roto and tracking: removing a green screen with Keylight, Key Cleaner and Advanced Spill Suppressor, then checking the alpha channel and cleaning up the spill.
• Rendering and export: exporting an H.264 MP4 from the Render Queue or through Media Encoder, rendering only part of a composition, and fixing exports that stall or lose their sound.
• Shortcuts, projects and fixes: the keyboard shortcuts for the timeline, previews, layer properties, markers and the work area, and the Keyboard Shortcuts editor for changing them.

How I write an After Effects guide

I explain the movement before the controls that create it. Once you know a layer should slow into its last position, the speed graph tells you what to adjust; a list of handle values on its own doesn't. An expression gets its dependencies named, so you know which layer or slider it reads before you paste it, and a render setting comes with the delivery it's meant for.

Where a feature's behaviour needs a source, the guides point to Adobe's own After Effects help. When a step depends on a particular version or effect, the guide says so. I aim for enough organisation to make the next revision comfortable without turning every short piece into a giant template.

About Ethan Brooks

My role here is After Effects motion-design editor. I work on timing in the Graph Editor, expressions and the controllers that drive them, precomps and project organisation, and getting a render ready for delivery. Preparing a project for revision and preparing a file for delivery are different jobs, so the guides treat them separately.

I can be opinionated about needless complexity. An elaborate rig earns its place when it makes a real change easier, such as swapping a title or moving a composition to a different aspect ratio. A short animation can usually stay a short, readable composition without an extra system of controls.

After Effects Club is an independent guide and is not affiliated with Adobe Inc. Adobe and After Effects are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe in the United States and/or other countries.