I have been creating visual effects with Adobe After Effects for a while now and over the years have gathered a number of plugins that I love to use. This is my personal favourites list and you should keep that in mind when looking at these plugins and evaluate whether they would be useful to your own film projects and visual effects.
Flair brings eight high-quality effects to Adobe After Effects and Photoshop® compatible programs. Among them are shine, glow, and sparkle effects with 16-bit and multi-CPU support. Curves are a very versatile and precise color-correction tool. The native After Effects version lacks control and accuracy to take full advantage of it. Twitch is a Plug-in for After Effects that synchronizes random operators to create stylistic video effects for motion graphics and visual effects. VIDEOHIVE STREAM CHATTING PACK Stream Chatting Pack 28982239 Videohive – Free Download After Effects Template After Effects CC, CS6 No Plugin 1920×1080 490 MB Stream Chatting Pack AE & Premiere Pro MogrtsAE – Premiere Pro TemplatesCC 2020 – CC2019 Compatible ProjectPremiere Mogrts files Included.Suitable for Twitch, StreamLabs, OBS, Facebook, YoutubeHD Resolution (1920×1080)Works. After Effects is a core application for many artists because it can do so much, especially when coupled with third party plugins. It’s time to take a dive into the glorious world of After Effects plugins for 2016. While there are so, so many, I thought I would share my favourite 10, which I have been using regularly this year. I've just installed After Effects CC 2018 and reinstalled Twitch onto it, however when I apply twitch to a normal footage layer, I check the boxes I want but - 9415942 Adobe Support Community.
Red Giant
Red Giant has some of the best products out there and you should definitely check out their website. These are my personal favourite Red Giant plugins for After Effects and Premiere.
Trapcode Particular
I love to create particle effects in Adobe After Effects. I use them for explosions, dissolves, laser beams, destruction and all sorts of other detailed effects. While After Effects comes with the built in CC Particle World effect, I did find it limiting at times.
Trapcode Particular offers many advanced particle controls like detailed particle property animations, physics an auxiliary system to spawn child particles and advanced shading.
It is very easy to use and I recently made a tutorial for it showing you how to create cool Fireworks effects using Trapcode Particular.
Magic Bullet Suits & Magic Bullet Looks
Almost without exception, all videos I have upload to YouTube have been colour corrected and colour graded to some extent. While Adobe Premiere and After Effects contain a lot of built in tools to help you take charge of the colour of your footage, one plugin collection I have learnt to love is the Red Giant Magic Bullet Suite. The Magic Bullet Suite has recently been split up into a few separate suites and the one that I would choose is the Color Suite.
This suite includes a great set of tools for correcting any colour issues with your footage and achieving a cinematic look. Out of the Suite, the one plugin I’ve been using the most is Magic Bullet Looks.
Magic Bullet Looks is the simplest tool I have ever seen to achieve cinematic looks with a few simple clicks. You simply apply the plugin to your clip and then you can select from a large set of existing colouring options and tweak them or built your own colour effect using a myriad of inbuilt processing steps.
Video Copilot After Effects Plugins
Besides creating amazing After Effects tutorials, Video Copilot also has a large number of high quality plugins available for Adobe After Effects that I enjoy using.
Video Copilot Twitch
Video Copilot Twitch allows you to easily create chaos effects for your videos. It allows you to distort colours, lighting or playback speed with a few simple clicks and animate flickering. Twitch is a plugin that I’ve used a lot, from my Zombie Hunter Halloween VFX Short Film to the logo for Surfaced Studio. The plugin is simple to use and won’t break the bank.
Video Copilot Element 3D
I have a full tutorial on how to easily create great looking 3D Integration VFX using the Video Copilot Element 3D plugin.
Element 3D is a plugin that allows you to add 3D elements into your scene directly inside of After Effects. This used to be a bigger deal before After Effects CC added Cinema 4D Lite and the Cineware plugin, but it’s still a great tool to easily get some 3D elements into your scene and animate them.
ELement 3D is actually a Particle Replicator and so it allows quick and easy setup and distribution of a large number of 3D ‘particles’ in your scene as well as animating them. It is not a ‘particle system’ and so can’t use it to spawn any new particles, but with some clever tricks you can use it for all sorts of cool visual effects!
Video Copilot Optical Flares
Another great plugin from Video Copilot that I enjoy using is Optical Flares. Optical Flares is a plugin that allows you to create great looking lens flare effects and comes with a large amount of presets that you can simply add to your scene and animate to your liking. As an example, I have used them for Walter’s laser vision effect in my YouTube trailer video.
I’ve been using it a fair bit and I find it very useful to add intensity to all sorts of lighting, laser, fire or explosion effects. I have seen it being used a lot in commercial work and for the price I think it’s definitely worth it
What Are Your Favourite Plugins?
This is my list of favourite plugins for Adobe After Effects. Which plugins do you enjoy using the most and why?
After Effects is a core application for many artists because it can do so much, especially when coupled with third party plugins.
It’s time to take a dive into the glorious world of After Effects plugins for 2016. While there are so, so many, I thought I would share my favourite 10, which I have been using regularly this year. Whether enhancing workflows, adding features that simply don’t exist in the core After Effects application or simply just making stuff look cool, After Effects has never been in better health when mixed with these great tools.
01. Twitch
- Price: $45
If your work’s just a little too clean-looking for your liking, Video Copilot’s Twitch is an easy-to-use and cost-effective way to rough things up a bit. With six operators to play with – blur, colour, light, scale, slide and time – it’s a straightforward way to spice up your projects with effects such as glitches, lens blur, RGB split and motion blur. Twitch comes with 25 ready-made presets to get you started, as well as 10 royalty-free sound effects to sweeten the deal.
02. Denoiser II
- Price: $99
As a After Effects artist who also works in 3D a lot, Denoiser II is essential for cleaning up renders. I use the Octane GPU render engine for a lot of my work, and find that Denoiser II can instantly fix a multitude of grainy render problems far more quickly than rendering out more samples in CG, and with GPU support, Denoiser II is quick as well and also works great with camera footage.
03. Magic Bullet Looks
- Price: $399
Magic Bullet Looks is the most intuitive color finishing tool on the market today for a wide range of editing software packages, including Adobe After Effects CC, Adobe Premiere Pro CC, Sony Vegas, Apple Final Cut X, Avid Media Composer, Davinci Resolve, Apple Motion and EDIUS. Get in, choose a preset look, tweak it a bit, and get on with your workflow.
04. Optical Flares
- Price: $124
Optical Flares is my favorite lens flare plugin for After Effects. It’s fast, it’s easy to use, and you can easily customize and save your flares for future use. The integration with After Effects is solid and integrates well, reducing most of the 3D flaws that comes when working with After Effects. This should be the plugin you use to create realistic 3D flares for your projects.
05. Trapcode Form
- Price: $199
One of the most popular and yet complex plugins for Adobe After Effects, Trapcode Form is a unique particle system that creates stunning and professional results. Instead of generating particles, Form’s particles just exist. This course helps you bridge the gap to mastery of Trapcode Form. Author Chad Perkins introduces Form’s properties, base forms, and particle types, and then moves on to mapping Form particles to 3D objects and creating effects like organic fireballs and 3D holograms. He also shows how to light particles in After Effects, integrate audio, and create 3D Form objects. The course includes three sample projects that are highly applicable to real-world client requests, including dissolving a logo design.
06. Trapcode Particular
- Price: $399
Trapcode Particular is one of our favorite plug-ins for After Effects. Unlike the native particle generators in AE, Particular gives users much more control over the particles created. With a little creativity you can use Trapcode Particular to produce some pretty amazing effects.
06. Twixtor
- Price: $595
Visually stunning results. In order to achieve unparalleled image quality we developed proprietary tracking technology that calculates motion for each individual pixel, enabling Twixtor to synthesize unique new frames by warping and interpolating frames of the original sequence. For eg if a footage is shot at 30 it can develop new frames and amake the slow motion.
07. Duik
Price: Free
Duik is known for its inverse kinematics (IK) rigging and animation tools, but it also can help you save time and add diversity to everyday motion graphics. Owen Lowery takes you on an in-depth tour of all the essential tools in Duik, studded with challenges to test your skills and mini-projects that show Duik in action. Learn how to rig characters with the IK tools, rig bones of puppet pin-based characters, animate a walk cycle, and control keyframe interpolation and speed. Plus, find out how Duik can extend 3D cameras and discover how to create traditional frame-by-frame animation with the Cel Animation tool.
08.Element 3d
- Price: $349
Element 3D is a third-party plugin that allows actual 3D models to be created from scratch or exported to Adobe After Effects, and rendered and composited at a high level of quality and impressive speed. Element 3D Essential Training walks you through the entire workflow and feature set. Author Chad Perkins starts with an introductory project to get you comfortable with the overall workflow in Element 3D, including transforming objects, applying materials, and lighting scenes. The course then details how to create 3D text and shapes, apply translucency and reflections, animate objects, and polish your projects with effects like ambient occlusion and motion blur. The course concludes with an advanced project that leverages each of these techniques.
09.Saber
Adobe After Effects Twitch Plugin
- Price: Free
Saber is a new FREE After Effects plug-in from Andrew Kramer and friends at Video Copilot. After a few hiccups, the free filter is now available, vastly improving on AE’s ancient built-in Beam effect. VCP Saber can be used to create energy beams, lightsabers, lasers, portals, neon lights, electric, haze, etc.
10. Plexus
- Price: $199
Adobe After Effects Plugins Free
Plexus is a unique plugin for After Effects and potentially not for everyone. However, if you are dependant on manipulating 3D shapes for motion graphics then Plexus should be considered an essential purchase.