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After Effects tutorial

This tutorial video will show 8 unique transition effect. Most of them are very simple, but visually impressive and can be used in interesting ways in your own videos. You may be familiar with some of them, but hopefully we can give you ideas and inspiration.

When assembling these effects it was important for us that they shouldn’t require third party plug-ins. We wanted simple solutions done with only After Effects that nonetheless didn’t look like the default integrated transition effects. 🙂

1 – Transition with Alpha Matte

This one looks very impressive and with the right resources can be used for a lot of different things. We used our product, Grunge Wall, but any footage is good as long as it uses an alpha channel. In other words it has a transparent background. In a nutshell you place a bonus animation between the two scenes, like in our example where a spot appears. But the Alpha Matte function makes this spot disappear and the scene appears where the animation should have been. It is a lot more impressive than it sounds and is a lot easier as well. 🙂

2 – Cinematic Fade In and Out

Here we took the traditional Fade In and Out function, added a bonus black layer that covers up the cutting and put that layer in Overlay Mode. This way beside a fade to black the colors also deepen, creating a more movie-like, warmer transition.

3 – Really Easy In

An extremely simple solution in which the next scene swims in from the side. But we put in a little extra to make the movement dynamic but wispy at the same time. The picture appears quickly and slows down over time. The video shows you how easy it is to draw the speed change graphically.

4 – 3D Bend

For this solution we used the Optics Compensation effect. Originally this is to correct lens distortion, but can be used pretty well as a Bend effect. You can make your cuts more dynamic and three dimensional.

5 – Bad TV Effect

A few swift moves and Motion Blur can help you replicating the effects of old videos jumping forward or when a bad TV causes the picture to run. It’s a great tool for swift cuts and tense videos.

6 – Keying

Here we used the Luma Key effect. This is a keying tool in which instead of determining a color you would like to cut, you cut either dark or bright tones. This makes it very useful for cuts as it turns the instant of cutting into a process and always adapts to the current scene, thereby making a lot of interesting effects possible.

7 – Turbulent Fade

Another simple method in which the two cut images are blurred together with distortion. Turbulent Displace effect is added to the traditional Fade In method, making it look like the first picture morphs into the second.

8 – Fade with Glow

A dreamlike solution for blurring scenes together. This one also begins with a simple Fade In effect, but what follows is an Adjustment Layer, which gives brightness to the blur of the scenes, with the Glow effect. Depending on the base video the result could look quite pleasant or grim.