Adobe After Effects 

This software is the industry standard for creating: motion graphics, animations, visual effects and compositing. Its user interface is a cross between Adobe Photoshop, which allows us to apply effects and filters to individual layers, and Adobe Flash, which utilizes a timeline to represent motion of vector information. So, think of it as Photoshop for video animation.

Working in After Effects

In After Effects, files have the .aep file extension (After Effects Project), which represents the After Effect’s equivalent of Photoshop’s .psd. The difference is that we can only work with one project at a time in After Effects, but this file extension allows us to import all sorts of digital media (photos, videos, sounds, etc.), or assets, as they are called in After Effects, into your project library. It is important to remember that when importing media into After Effects, the program simply creates links to these files and thus, they are not embedded on the .aep document. This means that we can import as many assets into our newly created project without the burden of an immense file size.

Among supported file extensions are:

Adobe Soundbooth, BMP, Flash Video, GIF, Mp3, Illustrator, Jpeg, Mpeg, Photoshop, Png, Quicktime, Swf, PDF, Etc.

The project space is highlighted above. This is where your media files, in this case a PDF file of the Mississippi River, are imported to.

What After Effects Can Do For You

After Effects is beneficial by allowing us to combine different finished media files, and add post production effects allowing for a new synthesized product to be created.  For instance by combining diagram drawings with a video footage of an ecological system, we can create a new rendering that exhibits multiple layers of information at once and explains the landscape in an entirely new, dynamic fashion.

*information on this page comes from using Adobe After Effects as well as tutorials inlcuding those from Lynda.com