Adobe After Effects CC is much like Photoshop for the creative video professionals. It provides a complete set of dynamic resources to make shorter, quality effects for your movies, motion graphics, social media advertisements, digital content and animations.

The node based approach simplifies the process of animating a wide variety of objects, including graphics, infographics, charts, and diagrams.

The whole new editor allows you to rebrand your existing 360 degree videos, and convert them into 3D cubes for object removals, visual effects, and much more.

The history of After Effects dates back to 1993 when it was originally released for only Macintosh operating system. It was then in the year 1997 when the first version was built for Microsoft Windows with a combination of new features including layer compatibility, tabbed windows, rulers, 3D channel effects and much more.

The newest version of After Effects contains performance improvements. These fix the traditional problem of slow loading of layer previews and you experience faster performance without having to upgrade your computer’s hardware.

While Adobe Premiere is mostly used to render longer videos of several minutes or hours, After Effects is popularly used to render videos with shorter time span of just a few minutes or seconds depending on the actual requirement of the producers. Adobe After Effects provides an all-encompassing platform for the video producers, cartoonists, social media strategists, filmmakers, and graphics designers.

As the name best describes, the program is called as After Effects because it is not mean to produce independent videos but to create special effects once the footage has already been made. This means that, After Effects is meant to be used with a combination of other video editing programs including Adobe family software Adobe Premiere Pro.

For instance, if you already have a video in hand, you can further polish it with the special effects and tools. This may include diverse forms of special effects used in social media and TV advertisements, films, online content and animations.

The program comes with a diverse set of templates to quickstart without having to initialize everything from scratch. This is something which should save you an enormous amount of time and efforts.

Create 2D footages, 2D animation characters, apply noise, particles, text, animation effects, and much more. The visual keyboard shortcuts give you an instant access to the important program features without having to go through complex menus. However, it requires an in-depth knowledge, formal training and experience to make use of After Effects. It’s not meant to be used by not so tech-savvy people.

Since Adobe After Effects is the part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud edition, it comes with a subscription-based model where in you get free updates on a continuous basis. It offers syncing with your other devices. This means that, your application settings and preferences are stored on the cloud, rather than the local storage. And whenever you install Adobe After Effects onto a different device, you get the same settings automatically without having to bit customize it.

One of the key benefits that AfterEffects offers is that it runs faster without needing hardware upgrades to use some of its advanced video editing features.

As one would already predict, After Effects supports importing your existing artwork from other file formats including Avi, MP3, MP4, M4A, 3GP, GIF, AAC, AIFF, WAV, QuickTime and countless others. You can even download third-party codecs to increase the capability to import furthermore file types.

In the case of JSON assets, After Effects makes it incredibly easy to keep your content updated. This means that, your JSON assets will be automatically updated as and when the original files are modified.

Moreover, you can also import a wide variety of image files stored in the RGB color model. If your images are stored in non-RGB color formats with limited color profiles, you will want to first convert them to the RGB color model prior to importing them into the main application.

After Effects allows exporting your artwork into other Adobe family software such as Adobe Premiere, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.

Is Your Hard Drive Filled With Too Many Duplicate After Effects Videos, Special Effects, Animations & Short Films?

A duplicate video is an unwanted copy of your original film, animation, special effect, or a digital content that may be located in the same folder, different folder, different partition, or a whole new external drive.

The duplicate videos clog your hard drive and you soon run out of disk space. Aside from cluttering your hard disk, these files slow up your machine and impact the productivity. Identical files make it difficult to find the right version of your After Effect projects.

It is completely safe to delete these files unless they are located in the Windows, System Files or Program Files directories of your hard drive.

While external hard drives and online cloud storage platforms are merely a means of taking backups of personal information, they soon run out of disk space when used indiscriminately. For example, copying the same folder contents over and again to different folders of the same drive may lead you to the problem of duplication. If you’ve file synchronization feature enabled across multiple devices, you may soon end up with duplicate versions of the same After Effect videos on multiple places.

It is therefore important to regularly clean up your hard drive, external hard disk, USB flash drive and online cloud storage platforms at least once in a month.

The Proven Way To Securely Delete After Effects Duplicates

Manual scanning is not an option, especially if you’ve several Gigabytes of files scattered across different locations and drives. It’s next to impossible to individually browse through each and every folder and sub-folder of your computer just to find duplicate files.

This is where automatic duplicate finding tool Clone Files Checker could be very helpful. Clone Files Checker, a previous scan utility from Sorcim Technologies comes with advanced algorithms to automatically find your duplicate files. The program uses the widely popular MD5 Hash Algorithm to compare your files and ascertain duplicates. With 100% scan accuracy and faster results, the application makes it incredibly easy to keep keep track of your duplicates and reclaim the lost storage.

This program offers two scan types. The Full Scan takes care of every single duplicate irrespective of its type and size. The Custom scan offers a more flexible way to select specific file types based on your needs (Documents, Images, Videos, Music and Archives).

If you are a photographer and mainly detailing with photos on a regular basis, you will want to choose the Custom scan option and check the Images box. This will narrow down the search results to only image file types. Furthermore, you can apply the File Size Filters which allow you to set an upper and lower file size limit. The added advantage of this method is that it is incredibly quicker and saves a lot of time eliminating unwanted results.

If your priority is to reclaim the lost storage space, Full Scan should be your choice. The full-scan may take some time depending on the size of your data, and show up the results grouped in different pairs based on common hash. You can view file previews to see the content of the actual file without needing to open it externally.

The detailed steps are outlined below:

1. Download Clone Files Checker from the official website of the Sorcim Technologies.

2. Install and run the application through the Start Menu/ Desktop shortcut.

3. In the main interface, click on the Add button.

4. Select the directory that contains your Adobe After Effects videos, and then click on OK.

5. If you have two or more directories that contain identical files, you’ll want to repeat the Step # 4 for each of those directories.

6. Once all the directories are successfully added, choose one of the following options:

a. Full Scan

b. Custom Scan

7. If you’ve selected Custom Scan option, select the appropriate file types you want to include in the scan (Documents, Music, Videos, Archives and Images).

8. If you wish to further customize the scan for specific file sizes, you may use the file size settings. For example, to scan all files belonging to 10 KB to 10 MB in size, check up the Ignore files smaller than and Ignore files larger than options and set 10 KB and 10 MB in the respective input boxes.

9. Finally, click on the Start Search and the application will begin duplicate file scan.

10. Once the results are accumulated, you’ll be prompted to select one of the options from Quick-Fix and Review & Fix.

11. If you don’t have much time to review each duplicate file, use the Quick-Fix option. Select the version you want to retain (Newest/ Oldest), and then your prefered action (Move to Recycle Bin/ Move to Folder).

12. If you want to examine duplicate results and individually mark/ unmark files, go with the Review & Fix option. Use the automatic selection feature to choose one of the following selection criterias of your choice:

• Select newer files in each group: This selects all newer files in each pair
• Select older files in each group: This selects older versions of your files in each group
• Select files by location: This allows you to specify directory to mark or unmark certain file entries. This is especially helpful if you want to preserve files from a certain folder of your hard drive.
• Deselect all: This unmarks all marked file entries

13. Finally, click on Select Action, and then choose whether to move your files to the Recycle Bin or to an entirely new folder.