The Top Ten Things After Effects Users Love and Hate about Motion

I teach Motion to a lot of After Effects users. Sometimes they end up in my class because they want to be there; other times their organization has sent them and they arrive kicking and screaming, ready for a fight. Either way, after clearing away a lot of misconceptions and getting them to actually use Motion for 3 days, I find almost every After Effects user comes away with a new respect for - and frustration with - this wonderful yet sometimes annoying application.

Ease and Wizz

Virtually all After Effects users take advantage of the Easy Ease keyframe assistants. Applying them makes your animations elegantly speed up and slow down. But there are alternatives, right?

There are. Switching a keyframe’s interpolation to Auto Bezier, for example, will give half the ease of Easy Ease. You can also edit the keyframe interpolation handles in the Graph Editor, or Option (Alt) + double-click a keyframe outside of the Graph Editor to open the Keyframe Velocity dialog, where you can numerically dial in the ease amount.

Beyond these Bezier interpolations are a set of interpolation behaviors originally written by Robert Penner for Flash users, based on other mathematical formula such as sine or exponential curves. Ian Haigh has adapted these for use inside After Effects by writing a series of scripts that apply the equivalent expressions to After Effects keyframes. The package is called Ease and Wizz, and is available for free (although donations are appreciated).

Final Cut Help - Animating Text with Keyframes

Join Apple Certified Trainer Mason Dixon as he shows you how to animate text with keyframes in Motion.

Animating a Sky Part 2 - Photoshop for Video

Instructor Richard Harrington shows you how to add an animated sky to your still photos using Photoshop and After Effects. Part 2 of 2.

Animating a Sky Part 1 - Photoshop for Video

Instructor Richard Harrington shows you how to add an animated sky to your still photos using Photoshop and After Effects. Part 1 of 2.

Kensington Mice and After Effects CS4

After Effects CS4 has added a “Unified” camera tool to aid navigation in 3D space. Instead of having to scroll through three separate camera tools - Orbit, Track XY, and Track Z - to reposition an active camera or reframe an alternate view, users can now use a three-button mouse to quickly switch between these three tools.

All of our computers here have Kensington mice that include a clickable scroll wheel as the third (middle) mouse button. And lo and behold, they don’t work out of the box with AE CS4; the clickable scroll wheel defaults to toggling between horizontal and vertical scrolling. But a couple of settings tweaks will make your mouse behave the way you want:

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