What is Adobe After Affects?

What is Adobe After Affects?

After Affects has been the leading program in the video compositing industry since the 90’s. It is used for adding visual effects to videos or animations. After Affects can also be used to create animations of both text and complex characters. Other things like adding clips into a clip or overlaying green-screens come with ease. A quick run through YouTube will show kids using After Affects how to add lightning strikes, glowing eyes, and lightsabers to their videos.

After Affects packs some of the most powerful editing tools available for video, such as the Rotobrush which lets you automatically paint a character out of any background you choose in minutes vs. hours of manual frame-by-frame editing. All of these features make this program specifically hardware intensive, so be sure to have at least 8GB of ram and a ton of CPU power before trying to use it.

After Affects can do a lot, and even though it is easily overshadowed by programs like Flame and Smoke Advanced, it won’t burn a $60,000 hole in your pocket like the latter.



Adobe creates a lot of programs, many of which I found myself unfamiliar with until recently. Most people know about Flash, Photoshop, and Adobe Reader. But those aren’t the only programs Adobe develops. In the past, it was a fairly large investment to buy the suite however in recent years, =standing each of Adobe’s software programs.



In the 6th iteration of the Adobe Creative Suite (that’s where the “CS” comes from), there are 16 programs. In addition to the Creative Suite, there are several other suites and enterprise products. For time’s sake, I’ll just focus on the primary 16.

Photoshop® CS6 Extended
Illustrator® CS6
InDesign® CS6
Acrobat® X Pro
Flash® Professional CS6
Flash Builder® 4.6 Premium Edition
Dreamweaver® CS6
Fireworks® CS6

Adobe Premiere® Pro CS6
After Effects® CS6
Adobe Audition® CS6
SpeedGrade™ CS6
Prelude™ CS6
Encore® CS6
Bridge CS6
Media Encoder CS6