here are 20 effects that you can use to do some really
very useful things very quickly inside after effects so let's get stuck in
and you can follow this project file for free down in the description if you want to follow
along at home the first effect is radial white now i use this exclusively for animating pie charts
or pac-man just make sure that the white center is in the middle of your circle and you are good
to go and if you don't want a sharp edge you can increase the feather property and even use this as
a wipe on your footage if you want a distracting transition in your 113 million dollar feature film
the next is cc sphere and that turns your layer into a sphere great for turning maps into planets
gives you all the properties to rotate it however you would like and of course you can
adjust the lighting as well if you are serious about making planets in after effects i would
give a video co-pilot's free plug-in orbit try it does all of this but just with a lot more pizzazz
the next effect is mesh warp meshwork gives you all of these lines and allows you to click and
drag them to warp and distort your footage you can increase the amount of rows and columns to
get more fidelity and get specific with what you are distorting or reduce them to get a smoother
look but say you want to place a video in a screen you're going to want to try the effect cc power
pin this gives you some really useful handles on the corner of your composition and also some even
more convenient perspective guides as well so you can just move these into the corner of your screen
and you can be sure it is going to line up with the correct perspective but what if your screen or
surface was curved in that case with this curved monitor we can use the effect busy air warp that
is similar to power pins but gives you these extra handles to warp the edges and create curves on the
edges of your composition and this can also be useful when fighting lens distortion as well
the next is cc bend it now this allows you to place the start and end of the object
that you want to bend and then of course you can just bend it with this bend property here
and you can end up with something like this but if you do bend it in any sort of significant way
the bounding box might cut off your layer so then we're going to use our next effect
grow bounds and you want to apply that before cc bended or other effects in the layer stack
and then you just want to increase the pixels and essentially what this does is behind the scenes
tells after effects that the bounding box of this layer is much larger than it actually is without
scaling up what's inside and to be honest this is mostly used to get other effects like cc bandit to
work properly alright the next effect is mirror which is great for creating a quick reflection
or if you've got a symmetrical object you can just animate half of it and flip it just make sure the
center is in the middle and change the reflection angle and then you've got twice the animation
for half the work or you could use this on some footage to create an effect similar to the intro
sequences to dark the next effect is transform now this just adds the familiar transform properties
position scalar rotation up here in the effects control panel this is really useful like in this
case when we already have some animation on the scale property of our square here and let's say
we want its scale to increase as well so we can just animate its scale property up here
which will bring up an additional scale property down in the timeline and we can increase its scale
as well here so now there's two separate scale animations going on with this square
all on one layer no need to add a null or parent it or anything like that the next is simple choker
now this allows you to choke which is expand or shrink the edge of your layer so if you increase
the choke map entrance your layer down and you decrease the choke mat it expands it but it kind
of just expands out as black so you might have to add a fill effect on top here but i love this
for just forcing rounded corners on a lot of my shapes the next effect that does a similar thing
is roughen edges so again this effect distorts the edges of your layer but in this case in a
rough manner this is really helpful to make your shapes not look so clean and digital and maybe
look a bit textured like perhaps they were paper or hand drawn and one top tip is to
use two instances of the roughen edges effect one with a larger scale and then the second one
with a much smaller scale and a smaller border as well so that way you've got the roughness of
the line on the edge of the shape and then within that line there's some roughness as
well to just give it some more detail the next effect is time code and this will just create
a time code on your layer you have options to change how it looks and this is really useful
for sharing with your team and your client to get more specific feedback and you can also pre-comp
this layer right click go to time time reverse and now you've got a very dramatic countdown
the next effect is grid and this straight up just creates a grid nothing too special you can adjust
the size and the shape with these corners and it just saves you drawing a lot of lines the next
is cc ball action now this is one of the stranger effects in after effects it turns everything into
a 3d ball which you can scatter around to create some sort of explosion or you can twist them to
i don't know look fancy but what i like to use this for is to create a grid that's similar to an
lcd screen so from the default settings all i do is decrease the grid spacing to something small
like zero or one and then you've got these tiny lines which looks like it's splitting
it up into pixels and with pretty much no work looks like an lcd screen now the next effect
is mosaic this is for when you really need to pixelate something so by default the horizontal
and vertical blocks will be the same number which is 10 and if you're in a 16x9 composition
it will turn these into rectangles so to lock these so that they are always square
alt click the stopwatch next to vertical blocks to bring up the expression window pick whip that to
the horizontal blocks property and then add to the expression asterix 0.56 and that will keep all of
these blocks square while you're in a 16 by 9 grid no matter how many blocks you increase this to
the next effect is checkerboard and similar to the grid effect this creates a checkerboard and just
saves you drawing it yourself you can scale it up you can scale it down and just have a lot of fun
animating the album covers for your scar band the next effect is cc reptile and this
is a great way to duplicate your composition or lay into a pattern you just need to expand it
in the directions you want it expanded and it will create multiple versions of that layer you
also have the options to change how it is tiled if you want them flipped or folded or even random
now the next effect is echo so if we apply this to this animation we get a delayed version of
this circle but if we increase the number of echoes we can change the blending mode as well
and decrease the decay we can start to get a bit of a motion trail which can have a very
cool effect especially if we decrease the echo time as well and you've got a nice smear effect
number 19 is cc radial fast blur i've shown this in a few videos so let's apply this to this
shape layer with lots of rectangles and this is a great way to add directional shadows and lights
so let's increase the amount a fair bit and set its zoom to brightest and now if we just adjust
where the center is it will act as a light source as if light is sort of beaming through
these rectangular windows and to make this look like shadows we're going to use our last effect
which is cc composite so cc composite is a great utility effect it composites the original layer
back on top after you've added your effects so let's first add a fill effect and let's
just make this a very dark red color that will be our shadows and then if we add cc composite
it brings our original red rectangles back to the top and we can move our center around so
it looks like shadows again and now this looks much more like shadows and this is all still
on one layer if you'd like to learn animation and motion design techniques i've got a playlist
of some of the best tutorials on this channel for you to take a look at i'll see you in the next one