hi I'm Ben Marriott I make weekly motion design tutorials and this week I'm gonna
break down my top 5 favorite plugins for After Effects
let's begin
alright
so these aren't your flashy plugins that will do all the work and that you will
instantly get a cool graphic as a result I want to highlight the plugins that are
actually useful in creating commercial work they're not as sexy but they are
useful to get some sexy free plugins saber and orb from Video Copilot will
show you a good time and leave you feeling empty afterwards
and I do have to give an honorable mention to Duik from Rainbox which
hundred percent deserves to be on this list but I don't do an awful lot of
character ringing in my work and I haven't used it enough to give it an
honest recommendation but it's a crazy powerful rigging tool number five
TextEvo which is name your price on a script.com this is by far the sexiest plugin
of the bunch and essentially it's a heavily simplified interface over here
on the right for the text animated properties do you see if you dare delve
deep enough down into this menu down here and it just makes it really easy to
apply those and tweak them and now with our layer selected it does have to be a
text layer we can go up here and choose where we want to apply it to the
animating in or the animating out of our text let's select in for now click apply
which will add these effects and keyframes and let's add an animation
based on its position and based on its opacity so just by clicking those
buttons we've now got this animation pretty cool for a few clicks you can
also select down here whether it's based on the letters which it is now old words
or the lines I always always choose lines and pretty much use it only in
this combination and over here in our effects panel you're gonna choose how
many pixels the position wants to move in you can delay certain elements and
fiddle with it in a way a lot easier than going into the text animation
properties but be aware that relying on a plug-in like this can be dangerous not
fatal but not far off you might find that all of your text animations start
to look the same because it's so easy to get a result like this so just because
it's easy doesn't mean it's the right way but if you are on a tight deadline
and something like this is gonna be fine I do recommend it you can also do wacky
stuff like this but please don't
number four is ButtCapperfrom Adam Plouff
the plug-in or tool behind rubber hose and overlord plug-in sleaze every day
and this is name your price on gum road and battleaxe.com I love this because
it is so specific so so specific but really useful so I've drawn a head here
and we've got the mouth drawn with a simple line from our pen tool and at the
moment has this these square ends to the line if you want this to be around we
simply click over here and bam around want the eyes to have rounded edges
BAM they're round our head we click it nothing happens that's because these
aren't the ends of the caps of the stroke this is a complete shape so if we
hold alt and click on this we get round corners click on this style we get the
you know this style of corners in fact a rectangle I just find I use this all the
time most of the time I like my strokes rounded and I find this plugin saves me
so much time instead of having to navigate way down here and select all
these little triangles down here and then changing the cab down here it's all
done with one click two thumbs up number three is VC vibrance which is name your
price on Video Copilot it is an effect they call it a plug-in on the
website it might be a preset I'm not sure but it can do two things amazingly
well the first thing is recolor desaturated object so we type in vibrance
up here and add it we can see that already it's changed that gray fire to
this lovely green fire and we can change the color up here with this eyedropper
tool and select any color we like and we can control the levels of luminance that
it preserves its vibrance the amount of gamma as well loads of awesome stuff and
it's great for compositing and maintaining the brightness of something when you change
the color but I mainly use this plugin for its matte alpha effect at the moment
it's selected off but if we change this to on you'll see that it removes all of
the black from this image if you get rid of the background and turn our
transparency on you can see that this sort of main fire shape is all that's
left in the Alpha Channel and this is an excellent alternative to using blending
modes when something doesn't work exactly right you don't want it to
get too muddy I use this a lot for textures so I've got this texture layer
here and if we add VC vibrance we can change the matte alpha to only so it's
not going to recolor it and here we can see the visible blue background and only
these sort of white areas are visible similar to the screen blending mode but
now it can have a fill effect and here we can change the color of what's left
in the Alpha Channel and get some results that simply change the blending
mode just doesn't allow number two is ease copy which is name your price on
aescript and this plugin has been so useful to me ever since I discovered it
now this plugin does exactly what it promises from its name it allows you to
copy the easing influence values from one two or more keyframes and paste them
onto other keyframes and even other properties so say we've got this swell
animation of a little square bouncing up with its scale property and we've gone
to all the trouble of animating all these keyframes in the graph editor and
getting a nice lovely curve and it's all looking good and we want to match the
timing to an animation of another property maybe the position of this
Pentagon over here so let's make a position keyframe down here add a
keyframe up here another one and one more and the moment it's all linear and
doesn't match up anywhere close to the square so we can easily select our
scaled keyframes from our square select copy select the keyframes from our
Pentagon click on paste ease over here and if we play them back they're both in
sync this is really handy for getting your timing on your animations tired and
then of course you can offset them to create some different effects but this
is really useful and number one you probably guessed it is FX console which
is free from Video Copilot ever since this came out every motion
designer I know loves it and wants to marry it now on paper this sounds like just an
effect search bar from what's up here but it's a lot more than that so with a
layer or a comp selected you could press a keyboard shortcut I've got is command
space which is the default and I'll open up this little toolbar wherever your
cursor is and then you can simply start typing in an effect and it will bring up
all the effects under there and simply apply it with one-click gone
are the days where you would have to physically move your mouse over to the
effects preset and click down and and press the effects like in the end at all
and now you can simply press a shortcut and type them in like Edgar Wilde would
do you also have space down here to select your favorite effect so I've got
a fill and curves on mine at the moment so you can simply click those with one
click and quickly start to build up your animation from effects at your
fingertips another great thing about FX console is when you open it up you have
this export button here and when you click you can either save what's in your
composition window as a PNG or copy to the clipboard we can easily open up
Photoshop and paste it in I find this great presentation decks while making
simple adjustments to style frames or you know making you YouTube thumbnails
all the time and it's just damn good time all around it's free it'll save
your time you won't regret it please let me know it down in the comments what
other free plugins you love and use all the time I'd love to know hopefully there's
some I have never even heard of and that I get to use and please don't
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