Adobe After Effects free for PC, Mac

Adobe After Effects is the most famous application in the professional world for creating special effects, motion graphics, and animations. With a history of almost 30 years, this program is undoubtedly one of the best tools of its kind, essential in large film, television, advertising, and web studios.

What is Adobe After Effects?

Adobe After Effects is a digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing application developed by Adobe Inc. and tailored to be used in all kinds of post-production processes, like in filmmaking, video games, or television production.

It is one of the most famous and used solutions in its category, as it allows you to add all kinds of animations, and effects, add objects to your footage, perform corrections, image stabilization, and lots more. As part of the Adobe suite, it works great with all the other Adobe solutions, like Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, or Adobe Premiere Pro.

What are the key features of Adobe After Effects?

• Text animations: Nothing's more impacting than eye-catching animations. Through text animations, you can make your words alive, add motion (to 2D and 3D texts), and carry more with less. You can control everything, such as which elements to move and how they move (jump, float, slide, etc.), change the opacity, the color, control the speed, make them rotate, follow a pre-defined path, and more.

• Effects: Unleash outstanding visual effects and let the magic happen in front of your eyes thanks to the huge catalog of effects. For example, you can add bright sunshine, change the weather onscreen, add lens flare, and bring smoke alive. In addition, you can also add 3D geometry, turn animation into HD videos, or work with Cinema 4D renderer.

• Motion graphics: You can animate all kinds of backgrounds, logos, images, titles, or objects to create dazzling motion graphics. Of course, you can finely tune your keyframes and animation paths or adjust anchor positions. Transitions are also important, and that's why you can create dynamic ones with animations, shapes, and colors, use masks and smoothly change your whole scene. Play with layers and compose by importing files from Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro, or other Adobe apps.
• Correction: Content-Aware Fill allows you to seamlessly remove boom mics, people, and signs from live-action footage. On the other hand, Warp Stabilizer VFX is capable of compensating for unintentional movement, so you don't need to throw out shaky footage.
• Rotoscoping: You can easily remove objects and cut moving elements from your video and optionally add them to other footage without using any green screen. Indeed, it is able to create a matte that isolates an object from what is behind it based on strokes you draw on top of the element. Additionally, the Content-Aware Fill tool can automatically mask objects and replace them with new images from other frames (hence, you don't need to edit between keyframes).

• Motion tracking: Tracking the movement of an object in a video can bring lots more innovative options to your footage. Hence, Adobe After Effects is able to create logos, graphics, or texts smoothly following the motion of people, environmental effects, cars, or the camera itself. But it doesn't stop there, as you can finely control tracking data, keyframes, and how your motion tracking assets show on the timeline.
• Collaborate: As a team, being efficient is key to delivering high-quality content while staying productive. Hence, Adobe After Effects lets you collaborate through online feedback appearing where you need them (like on specific parts of your animation timeline) so you can review and comment on work or make corrections as fast as possible. In addition, remote cloud sharing lets you manage several projects simultaneously, and 100 GB of storage is available through Frame.io.

How to use Adobe After Effects?

Adobe has created many different valuable resources so you can progressively learn how to use Adobe After Effects. Consult the Get Started section as well as all the other tutorials for beginner and experienced users.

Beginner

Start by getting to know Adobe After Effects, work with compositions, create and animate text, repair videos, and more.

Experienced

Learn the export features, like exporting broadcast-quality video projects and exporting for Instagram, Facebook, or Vimeo. Also, learn the basics of Master Properties, pushing and pulling changes with Master Properties, and creating versions with CSV files. Adding special effects to a video is also super stunning, as well as techniques to add 3D texts, adjust for shaky camerawork, and Rotoscope footage.

How much is Adobe After Effects?

We provide you with the free 7-day trial version of Adobe After Effects. As a paid service, you may consider paying for it from the official website if you want to keep using it once the trial is finished.

Is Adobe After Effects safe?

Adobe After Effects is safe to use. For information about how your data are collected, you can consult the Adobe Privacy Policy.

Does Adobe After Effects support VR?

Yes, Adobe After Effects is able to build VR environments thanks to its Create a VR environment feature that automatically sets up the camera composition to author 360 videos. Also, you can use a wide range of tools to add specific effects and transitions.