This Discotheque was generated completely in After Effects with solids, effects, and lights. Trapcode Lux give you volumetric light and Starglow gives you amazing sparkles on the disco ball. I threw in an animated disco floor and a bit of a camera move, just to jazz things up....

CINEMA 4D includes the ability to export composition files that can be imported straight into After Effects. This feature greatly enhances the workflow between CINEMA 4D and After Effects....

A quick way to make a lightsaber, as seen in the Star Wars trilogies....

While almost every 3D application renders a raster image, Maxon's Cinema 4D - armed with the optional Sketch and Toon also renders vector art as well. You can use the software as a design tool, implementing Sketch and Toon to illustrate your geometry. Then, you can export it to Adobe's Illustrator to take advantage of the vector artwork produced by Sketch & Toon...

The Matrix, a recent and highly popular film about virtual reality, features a striking visual representation of the raw code that comprises the Matrix, the mass hallucination which nearly every character in the film believes to be the real world. You can see good examples of this visual effect in the opening title sequence and in the scene where Neo, the hero, sees the Matrix displayed as data for the first time (Scene 19 on the DVD, if you have it.) ...

Use Silhouette FX Roto to rotoscope areas of your video to isolate for tinting, as seen in Sin City....

Create the look of the water's surface with displacement and colorama....

This effect has been used to in movies like Sliding Doors and videos like Enigma's Return to Innocence, not to mention on The Benny Hill Show (though we doubt that they used After Effects ;-)...

There are literally hundreds of ways to create displacement maps. Here are a few recipes, tips and ideas that we've collected over the years from AE users and tutorials around the web....

Creating smoke in Photoshop has never been so easy....

Create a creepy dark hooded figure with Digital Trove PRIME and masks....

Create a snow globe with Cycore FX CC Sphere and some other fun effects. Plus, get a free Motionstream clip!...

This is an organic type treatment that I've seen in car commercials and the opening credits of a film recently. This effect uses fractal noise and the glow effect....

Memory failures while rendering can be a result of a bug in the Mac OS memory manager in Mac OS 8.5.1 and earlier. AE 4.0 runs into the problem when using all available RAM to cache frames. After Effects 3.1 doesn't cache multiple frames per item therefore doesn't run into the problem. If you're using AE 4.0 and not using all available RAM to cache frames, you're not likely to run into the problem....

Here is a sample of a day time shot that has been converted to a night time scene using a few adjustments. These are a guide only and I guarantee that your image will look different, so you'll need to tweak away....

This effect creates text that writes on with a strange blur, similar to the effect from the title sequence of "The Sixth Day" - a Schwartzenegger film that only 47 people saw (we were 2 of those people)....

I tried several things, including using Boris Cartooner, find edges, adjusting hue/saturation, levels, median (which worked quite well), minimax, and several combinations of the above filters. I tried Video Gogh and the effect just wasn't right. The best results came with exporting a filmstrip from AE and treating it with a series of filters in Photoshop....

Use masks to make a bat and animate the bat flying. This is an involved tutorial in which you will use a plethora of plug-ins to create a swarm of spooky rabid vampire bats that prey on the mind, coming at you through a thick terrifying fog....

Convert NTSC video to PAL and back with the highest quality digital format. No tape decks needed....