Trippy video stuff you can do with Adobe After Effects

Adobe After Effects is a powerful software that will revolutionize the way you edit your videos. From simple color correction to complex video manipulations, Adobe After Effects will be the tool that will give you the chance to get the same special effects that they use in movies.

The reason I chose Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere as my main softwares for editing video is because of its similarity to the environment of Adobe Photoshop. And because I am also into photography, being in the same environment as Photoshop gave me this "at home" kind of feel. From Adobe After Effects' layers and blending options to the filters like unsharp mask, RGB curves, and many others, it really does feel a lot like photoshop.

The video on the side shows an example of a video I made where I transformed my face into some sort of monster or demon. This was all done with Adobe After Effects by following a tutorial that is available on-line. One important skill in doing this video would be the use of the Pen Tool to trace my face. The others are simple color changes and distort effects. This kind of special effect uses what they call motion tracking. It is actually not that hard to learn.

There are a lot of other stuff in my portfolio and blog that you might enjoy checking out. Also, I will be posting my own tutorials very soon. I am actually working on them right now. I've just been really busy and haven't focused on it that much.

Here is another fun special effect that is not that hard to do. Basically you just need a tripod to make sure that your background remains the same and you just use the Pen Tool to make the other layer a mask and you just manipulate the time of that video to make it freeze.

The quality of my camera is actually not that nice. It is just a point-and-shoot digital camera. But you see I was able to come up with this even with just that kind of equipment. So what more if I had an even better camera? I could probably freeze time not just of myself but other people in the world. Imagine all the stuff you can do with that.

I this video you will see that I also used Adobe After Effects to add some Typography or animated texts in my video. There are already many presets that come with Adobe After Effects that will surely make your videos better and more professional.

Here is another special effect that is actually very easy to do. You just create two fire balls. They are basically a yellow ball with blurry edges that is surrounded by a translucent layer of red to make its surroundings look hotter.

After that you just set the position of the fireballs in the key frames. Once you learn this you will see that you will not only be able to edit videos in Adobe After Effects, you will also be able to animate and many other things. This is the same concept used in making the lightsaber effect.

I hope I was able to show why Adobe After Effects is truly superior against its competitors. There is just so much you can do with it. And it is not that hard to learn these. All you need is a decent internet connection and the willingness to learn and eventually you will be very skillful in video editing and special effects.