Adobe After Effects is a great tool for creating incredible Motion Graphics and Visual Effects. Before you get started, You’ll need to have After Effects installed on your workstation. While the program can seem scary and complicated at first, it shouldn’t take you too long to learn the basics which includes the General Workflow, Keyframes, Pre-composing, Masks & Track Mattes, Shape Layers and basic understanding of animation principles.

What is After Effects?

According to Wikipedia “Adobe After Effects is a digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing application developed by Adobe Systems and used in the post-production process of filmmaking and television production. Among other things, After Effects can be used for keying, tracking, rotoscoping, compositing and animation. It also functions as a very basic non-linear editor, audio editor and media transcoder.”

After Effects Tutorials

To learn After Effects, you can enrol yourself in an Animation school or can self teach yourself with hundreds of After Effects Tutorials available on the Internet.

To begin with, here is a List of Websites that offers online After Effects Tutorials. The list consists of both free and paid resources for learning the software. Since After Effects is all about experimentation, once you know the basics, let your imagination flow, experiment with the software and you will be able to create amazing Motion Graphics & Visual Effects.

Below you will find some Basic & Best Tutorials that will take you on a guided tour of After Effects and some of its important tools.

Basic Workflow & Terminology

Get familiar with the After Effects workflow in this brief overview of the tools, project windows, elements, compositions, nested comps, effects, keyframes, the timeline, expressions, exporting and the Render Queue.

After Effects Keyframes

This After Effects Tutorial covers the basics of keyframe animation, easy ease keyframes, and different interpolation methods.

Power of Pre-composing

In this tutorial, you will learn the basics of pre-composing layers in After Effects.

Creating Masks in After Effects

Learn how to quickly create masks in After Effects along with the keyboard shortcuts needed to make the process quick and efficient.

Track Mattes in After Effects

In this After Effects tutorial, Unlock the hidden potential behind track mattes.

Shape Layers and their animation options

If you are just getting started in shape layers for after effects, this will be the video you need to watch.