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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