The Best After Effects Plugins to Boost Your Productivity in 2022
I’ve been doing a lot of client work in After Effects over the past year. I needed to learn to deliver results fast and with high quality. Here are my top time-saving scripts and plugins!
This article will first mention the general plugins, scripts or presets that everyone should have to improve their workflow. After that I dive into more specialized use-cases, that are still general enough that most people will get some time-boost from them!
General Time Savers
Here are the tools that will come in handy no matter what kind of work you do with After Effects:
1. Motion Tools — For Easing and Aligning
The secret to good animation is good easing and timing! Adjusting easing in After Effects via the Graph Editor is cumbersome. This tool makes it easy to achieve fast and consistent results.
No more need for dragging Bezier curves trying to get it to look right!
As an extra on top, you can add an elastic or bounce effect.
This by itself would be already awesome but there is more greatness!
It also gives you more power to properly position anchors within your shapes.
You know how in After Effects when adding shapes it positions the anchor in the center of your composition. Then you manually need to set the anchor where you want, but never get it quite right?
Well, with Motion Tools you can perfectly position your anchors in any of the sides, corners, or the center of your shape!
Those two are killer features that save me a lot of time!
Get it here: https://motiondesign.school/products/motion-tools/ — $40
It is also included with some courses you can get at Motion Design School. I got it with Science of Character Animation by Markus Magnusson.
2. FX Console — The Power User Menu
This is another FREE must-have plugin!
This menu allows you to select any of your layers and when pressing a shortcut CMD+SPACE (by default) it opens a searchable power menu!
You can search for effects or presets and immediately APPLY them to the selected layer.
I come from a programming background, which means I know how much time you can save if you don’t have to use the mouse, but can simply type a command!
How much time? A LOT of time!
It also has other handy functions, like easily copying the current frame to your clipboard so you can send it over to your clients via slack message for example!
It’s not only a time saver. It’s beautiful and a joy to use!
Get FX Console — FREE
3. EasyLoop — Loop a clip with a simple shortcut
Do you edit a lot of content you need to loop, like short animations or seamless backgrounds? Or do you like to drop in some GIFs into your composition and need them to play over and over?
If any of your workflows involve looping at all, then this will be one of the greatest time savers!
I noticed how much time I was spending on looping things myself — you need to enable time remapping then create keyframes and move them around… it just all took too much time for something SO SIMPLE!
With this script, you can all do it with just one shortcut!
One of the simplest single-purpose scripts on the list. It probably saved me countless hours already!
Get EasyLoop — $5
4. FX StrokeSetter — Set stroke properties of multiple shapes
When you work with shapes, you might have run into this problem: You have a composition with 20 shapes, and you need to change a simple thing like the Stroke Width.
Now you realize you need to open the sub-sub-menus of each shape layer to access this one property and then change it everywhere manually. What a waste of time and motivation!
FX StrokeSetter makes it easy to change stroke settings of multiple shapes at once. Without digging deep into the individual menus. It’s a gift! And it is pay-what-you-want!
Show your gratitude by tipping the developers lavishly!
https://aescripts.com/fx-strokesetter/ — FREE
Special Workflow Time Savers
These scripts and plugins are god-sent if you follow some specific workflows described below.
5. Overlord — A better way to work between Illustrator & After Effects
Let’s admit it. After Effects isn’t that good when it comes to handling illustrations with their shape layers. The native way to import Illustrator files and then use them is clunky and cumbersome.
That’s where Overlord comes in. You can simply send your shapes over from AI to AE. No need to save/import.
It just lowers the barrier to doing something quick in Illustrator.
Very often I was sitting there thinking. “Do I need to open up Illustrator for that? That would mean I need to save it, import it… and that’s too much hassle.”
Then I spent too much time with the shape tools realizing it would have taken me seconds to do it in Illustrator.
Now, on illustration-heavy projects, I keep Illustrator running in the background. It became easy to switch workflows and send some sweet shapes back and forth.
https://www.battleaxe.co/overlord — $45
Bonus: Timelord — For a better workflow between AE, Adobe Animate, and Photoshop
This is by the same team as Overlord but simplifies the workflows between Photoshop, Animate, and After Effects. Especially valuable for animating frame-by-frame!
https://battleaxe.gumroad.com/l/timelord — $45
6. Handcrafted Look — Give more personality to your animations
Do you like to make your animations look more hand-crafted? I do this all the time. It just makes animations look more light-hearted and playful.
What I also do all the time is set up the chain of effects anew and fiddle around with parameters forever!
To tackle that kind of tinkering I created a couple of presets that achieve the kind of effect I want!
With some nice line boiling and color boiling.
With the “Handcrafted Look” presets it’s as easy as applying an effect and moving on.
I like to use it on text a lot to give it that wobbly animated look. But it can also work wonders for shape animations, character animation, or simple 3D animation.
I’m a big fan of handcrafted things and giving more personality to illustrations. Even if sometimes I have to cheat a little bit for that! If you are interested to stay up to date with what I am working on you can consider giving me a follow.
Handcrafted Look for After Effects — $3
7. Quick Chromatic Aberration v2 — Chromatic Aberration
Chromatic Aberration has become a quite popular effect over recent years. So popular that it even gets shipped by default with many creative apps like Procreate or NomadSculpt.
In After Effects it’s not very simple to add it.
You have to Pre-compose and duplicate the footage twice. Then separate RGB channels and finally add them back together with a Screen or Add blending mode.
That takes some time to add. It’s also not very efficient for After Effects internally. Your composition and CPU will have a hard time rendering there.
That’s where QCVA 2 comes in handy. It makes your life easier, and your CPUs.
It calculates the chromatic aberration on the GPU-accelerated. That means it renders almost instantly. The best thing — it’s completely free.
The guys from PluginEverything have also some other great scripts, and many of them are free as well. Take a look!
Get Quick Chromatic Aberration v2 — FREE
Bonus: 8. VHS IT — Apply VHS effect to your footage
The VHS effect has become quite popular and is often used in movies or documentaries to give a vintage vibe to your footage. Yet it takes often 10 to 30min to apply all the effects and get the results to look just right.
That’s where this plugin comes in. It makes it as simple as one click and adds the distortion, some interlacing, some discoloration, and allows you to still adjust the result in the created effects and compositions. And it looks great out of the box.
Get VHS IT — $5
Thanks for reading! Subscribe for more articles on animation and motion design!
