Plugins

Red Giant Complete

I finally stumped up and paid for this mega package of everything Maxon does for After Effects, including Trapcode effects (such as Particular, Form, Mir, and Horizon), Magic Bullet (such as Looks, Renoiser, Mojo and Film), Universe (which is pretty indispensable) and VFX (Supercomp, Kingpin Tracker and more). Expensive, but I figure it’s a legit business expense, and don’t regret it, because you get a LOT!

Video Copilot FX Console

This could be my favourite plugin of all time: changes the way you search for and apply effects. The first thing I add to any new system. The granular time savings add up. It’s free and if you don’t have it, you HAVE to get it.

Video Copilot Element 3D

Trying to learn Blender right now, but 3D apps make my head hurt. This plugin is a godsend: simple enough for me to wrap my head around but is capable of creating some incredible 3D stuff. In need of a major upgrade, and is possibly the biggest cause of After Effects crashing, but the trade-off is worth it.

Video Copilot Optical Flares

Better than Knoll Light Factory, this is the ultimate way to create fully customisable lens flares that look amazing. Crashes After Effects often, so like E3D, I have the muscle memory to save my project before applying the effect. This plugin is probably an industry standard by now.

Video Copilot Saber

Another free and super powerful plugin for creating glows, lightsabers, neon signs, lightning, electrical arcs. Brill!

Video Copilot VC Color Vibrance

Intensifies colour in a natural way, when you want stuff like a glow to really pop. It’s free, so why not?

Video Copilot VC Orb

Another free plugin. It’s like a cut-down version of Element 3D geared towards making planets, moons, or other 3D spheres.

RE:Vision Twixtor

Hands down the BEST way to retime footage. So much better than After Effects’ built-in Optical Flow, but is a bit more processor intensive, so I save this for when Optical Flow lets me down!

Vranos Composite Brush

Sometimes you’re faced with a tricky key, or you need to key something out of a strange colour or combination of colours, Composite Brush is your get out of jail free card for those situations.

Vranos Lockdown

Really good warp tracker for tracking irregular surfaces like faces and lets you composite or tweak moving or undulating surfaces. Mocha Pro has a new function like this, but Mocha Pro is wa-aaay more expensive.

Motion Boutique Newton

Sometimes you want a 2D physics simulator, and Newton is fast and easy to use. Has a bit of a learning curve, but not too bad. The results are fantastic though!

Motion Boutique Connect Layers Pro

Connecting layers or objects in After Effects to make ropes, connected lines, curves, with physics is harder than it should be. Connect Layers makes it super easy and flexible.

BAO Boa

Distorts layers along a path. I use this all the time. Way more than I thought I would. So useful!

Declutter

Invaluable! Allows me to take an unorganised project with comps and files all over the shop, and organise them into a streamlined project with everything in the right folders and sub folders. If I inherit a messy project, the first thing I do is run Declutter over it to bring it in line with how I like to organise projects. Also the last step I do when I’ve finished a project to ensure everything is neat and tidy!

GifGun

Export animated GIFs from After Effects.

Plugin Everything Deep Glow

The best glow plugin for After Effects: realistic, fast and flexible.

Plugin Everything TextBox

Another simple but indispensable effect: putting a box behind your text. I use all the time.

Plugin Everything Bezier Node

Simple Bezier curve animations. More useful than you’d think.

m’s Halftone

Want to halftone an image or gradient or anything, or create dot patterns? m’s Halftone is the best way.

Layers2Grid

Want to take a bunch of layers and turn them into a grid? Like the name of this script says… plus control over stuff like gutters, etc.

Randomatic

Want to randomize attributes like size, colour, position or anything else you can think of, Randomatic is for you. Randomness get be static, animated or wiggled.

PuppetTools

Really fast way to add inverse IK for character rigging.

Autofill

Really cool way to create handwriting effects or have graphics animate on.

AutoCrop

Handy way to crop your composition to the size of the contents within it.

TextExploder

Take a word, line or paragraph of text and break it into separate letters, words or lines for easy animation.

MOBO_Utils

Handy bunch of random utilities that make life a little easier: Export animated PNGs, bake selected expressions, collect fonts, Paste images into After Effects, Duplicate layers by x amount, generate colour palettes from images and more!

Flex

Dynamic grid layouts with tons of options.

Flow

Best way to add repeatable easing with easy to use graph editor. Use pretty much every day.

Two-Side Layer

When you want to rotate a layer in 3D space and have something different on the reverse. Simple!

Rift

Shift, sequence, stagger, or randomize layers properties like in and out points, keyframes, markers and more.

Motion

Motion has tons of features I never use, but one feature I use ALL the time is re-centring anchor points, or setting anchor points to the corners or edges of shapes. Other utilities can do this, I just happen to use Motion for that! Oh, and creating bursts… it’s very good at that too. I should really try and use more of this plugin…