After Effects Tools – #005

This post highlights the growing range of After Effects tools with a focus on one-click solutions that can help to speed up your workflow. Simple ideas, but fantastic time savers. Our recent favourites are shown below:

GifGun

Marty Mcfly loop created using GifGun

GifGun is a perfect 1-click solution to outputting gifs from After Effects. With a minimal interface, and additional options should you need them, it handles the entire gif creating process. Perfect for quickly creating social media friendly versions of your latest animations. We’ve used GifGun on several projects including the animated loop of Marty McFly and his iconic hoverboard.

Universal Audio

After Effects doesn’t always handle audio terribly well. But a good audio track can be essential for animation timing, or for editing video along to a voice over. Universal Audio takes care of this by adding a reference copy of a single audio track into all compositions so that you always have a good reference to the original audio track, at the right place in the timeline, without needing to duplicate and mute multiple copies of the original.

This helped on a recent project for Basis Technologies where the voice over had to match up with key points in the animation.

Roll it!

Animating unusual shapes to roll on screen looks simple but it can be a needlessly time-consuming task, which isn’t often easily repeatable. Roll it! takes the pain away calculating how an object should roll, even being able to handle complex shapes at the click of a button.

There’s also a trial of the plug-in available – see what it can do and we’re sure you’ll be hooked.