Transcription
There are so many presets included with After Effects, and chances are you don't even use them, which is a huge mistake. So, in this video, I've picked out my top After Effects presets you should be using in 2025, and best of all, they're already installed on your machine.
And before we jump in, I just wanted to let you know that for a limited time, I'm offering a discount on my courses. You can get all that info down in the description.
I've put all of my top picks for After Effects presets into this project file, which you can download for free down in the description. It just makes it easier to browse all of the presets visually in After Effects. And I've named all the layers what they're actually named in the effects and presets list. So, there are many presets beyond these top picks, obviously, but these are the ones that I think you're going to get the most use out of.
And I'm going to start with text, which is a little bit selfish because I created all of these. I had the fortunate opportunity to be asked by Adobe to create presets for text animators to be bundled with After Effects, and so you have them. You can search for all of these right here and start using them in your own projects. And with all the custom controls that you have in your effects controls, each one of these can look a lot different than they do by default. There's very complex expressions going on in the background to allow you to just control these with an easy set of effect controls up here. Uh, this slide and pop in is one of my favorites. It just is very simple, but very elegant text animator with controls again for animating it by word or by character, all kinds of things.
Fun fact: creating these presets actually led to me creating Type Jazz, which allows you to create really complex text animators with a very simple set of controls. So, go check that out if you're interested. But these are the text animators that I created, and I think that you're going to get a lot of use out of them.
All right, next up is the elements category, and this has a lot of different stuff in it. Starting with 2D text boxes, and these are actually really, really powerful. Now, by default, they look a little bland, but obviously, there are lots of controls. You can change this to be whatever color you want, style it however you want. But there are two different versions: one that creates a shape layer, and that is then tied to whatever layer you select right here. So, I've selected the text layer, and that sizes the box to that text layer. But there's also a 2D text box that's created with masks and effects. It draws this mask with expressions in the exact same way that the shape layer is sized to the layer that you selected, but then it creates that shape using effects on top of it. So, it's all existing on one layer. You can move this around, you can change the text to whatever you want, and it's all going to be on that one layer. So, if you've ever needed that where the text box actually lives on the text layer, that's exactly what this preset is for. And there are so many controls for how this actually looks. You can change the sizing of the box very precisely, you can round the corners as much or as little as you want, you can even sharpen those corners a little bit so they're not perfectly round, and it gives a very unique shape. And this goes for both of these presets. John Columbo on the After Effects team created these two text boxes, and they're just super, super useful. So, start using them in your projects.
Next up are these sets of graphs, which, if I remember correctly, were created by our very own Evan Abrams. Either him or John Columbo, sorry guys, if I mix up who created which ones here. I know that you actually collaborated on a lot of these. But anyway, they're just very nice-looking graphs that you can again completely customize with lots of controls for the graphs' heights, spacing, bar width, all kinds of stuff. They're all completely customizable. Check those out.
Next, we have a bounding box, which uses Source Rect Time. But again, whatever layer you have selected, it doesn't have to be text. You can choose any layer you want here, and then you can do things like offset the padding, so it can be right up against it or further away. You can control the handle size right here, or just use the shape layer's stroke width to adjust the line thickness, so you can dial that in and add bounding boxes to anything extremely easily.
Next up, we have this burst pop. This is kind of like a firework. There's actually some really interesting expressions going on in the background here. If you're interested, take a look at what's driving this entire thing. But it gives almost some gravity there at the end. Again, lots of controls here to be able to completely change this, including how it's easing out. There's a property down here at the bottom, burst twist, that makes a very interesting animation. So, play around with that one, that's a lot of fun.
Grid of crosses. This is just a really nice preset to have to be able to control how many copies there are to create this stylized grid. It'd be great for infographics or kind of UI elements. So, that's a really great preset.
Next, we've got popping map pin and simple map marker. So, popping map pin. This one actually has a handful of different icon types that you can choose from. Those are all really great to use, and the keyframes apply to every one of them. So, that animation of it popping in is going to happen. And this one right here is a lot of fun. It's almost like radio waves, but it's done using all shape layers, and you have different controls for the sizing, the speed of the animation, all that stuff.
Then we have a switchable cursor element. This one also has a drop-down, so you can change the icon to be anything you want from this list. Also, a really great one to dive into the expressions just to see how it's made, and you can create your own swap icon preset just like this. It doesn't have to be just these cursor elements.
And then finally, in this category, we have the right-on arrow, which I think is great. You can modify this path to be whatever you want. It comes out as this nice arc, but if you grab either of these points and manipulate it, it's always going to keep that arrowhead right on the end of the line. That's another great preset to have.
All right, moving right along, we've got number counters. These ones seem really simple, but they're actually super complicated and they're really useful. What you might not notice at first glance is that these numbers are being completely static as they animate, which is something that is not typical of number counters. And this is using a custom font. It's not a monospaced font, but all of these counters are monospaced. And I know for a fact that Evan Abrams had a hand in this one, probably John Columbo as well. But these really opened up possibilities that we didn't have in After Effects before. Again, using some pretty complex expressions, if you take a look in there to see how they're created, there's a lot more than what you think is happening under the hood because it allows you to take any font and essentially convert it to a monospaced counter so that your numbers stay exactly where they should be on each one of those characters as these numbers travel around. And all of these have controls for formatting and styling, all different kinds of things. They're really complex. You should absolutely be using these.
Next up, we have backgrounds, and there's just three in here. These are actually a lot of fun. Again, I think Evan created these ones. But we've got anime radial, and this is kind of like an anime-style speed lines that you could overlay on something else. So, it's black and white, but obviously, you change the colors to whatever you want and maybe use a blend mode to get it on top of something else. And it's dropping the frame rate. If I collapse all these effects, you can see these ones in parentheses. These are the actual effects creating this element, but these three up here are the controls for how it looks. So, we can increase or decrease the speed, we could change the center point around, and we can change the size to be larger or smaller. And the very last effect, posterized time, this is dropping it down to 12 frames per second. So, if I turn this off, it's going to be a lot smoother. You can type in whatever frame rate you want there, but 12 frames per second, that's kind of a classic anime style.
Next, we have the anime speed lines, which is much more colorful, but it's essentially the same kind of thing with some similar controls. So, if we grab these first three, speed angle and pinch. So, this is kind of like a perspective offset, so you can play around with that. There's not a center point like before because it's being created in a different way. But I think this is also just a super cool-looking effect.
Then finally, this last one is included in the backgrounds category in the presets, but I think it's more of an element. It is really simple. This one was created by Jason Boon of Boon Loves Video. Thank you, Jason, for this. It is very simple, but every now and then, you just need a frame, a border around your composition, and that's exactly what this does with some nice controls for the width as well as an offset. So, if you want to create kind of like a decorative frame, you can do that. It's very simple to control, and that is a preset I like to use all the time.
All right, finally, we have behaviors, utilities, and transitions. This is kind of a catch-all for these last three. The first one is a utility, lock anchor point to. So, I just have a square that's scaling up and down, and what this preset does is gives you this drop-down control and this slider control. So, first of all, when to sample. So, it's looking at which frame it should be taking a sample from to apply an anchor point to. So, by default, middle center, right in the center of that layer. But if I wanted it to be from the bottom center, I can switch it to that, and now it's going to scale from that point. And we're using this when to sample slider right here. It doesn't really make a difference if I change that to zero because it's not moving around and it's not changing shape. But you can choose when to sample using that slider, choose any side of your object that you want to scale from or make any transformation from, and that's where the anchor point's going to move to. Really great preset there.
Next up, we have flickering opacity at layer in and out point. Now, this is just something that is really great for quickly making that digital glitchy-looking flicker. So, if I trim this back a little bit, and we just set our work area so that we don't see any of the layers, it's going to flicker in and then flicker out based on those in and out points. And we can change things about this, like how long it takes the final opacity. So, I could change this down to half a second instead of a full second. And I've applied both the in and out presets to the same layer, so that's why we have some duplicate controls here. But I'm going to just change both of these to half a second, and we'll leave the final opacity at 100. And now this should take a half second to flicker in, a half second to flicker out. And it's just really simple. But imagine having 100 layers in a composition and you want them all to flicker on in sequence. That would be a great preset to apply because it's based automatically on the in and out points of the layer.
And then finally, we have the magnify and preserve alpha preset. And this is essentially taking the magnify effect, but then using a mask and expressions to preserve the alpha of what it's applied to. So, in this case, I actually have it applied to an adjustment layer. But let me turn that off and apply it directly to this text. Actually, let's just apply the magnify effect directly to this effect, and you can see that it's kind of duplicating that layer, and we can see both instances. Since there's an alpha channel on this text layer, we can see through that magnified version of it to the original, which is obviously not desirable. So, what we're going to do is apply the magnify and preserve alpha instead, which is essentially masking out the original layer based on the radius of the magnify effect. And it's all tied together with expression, so you don't have to worry about anything. It preserves that alpha no matter what, and it just creates a nice little magnifying effect, which obviously you could tie to say a magnifying glass graphic, and you're good to go.
But those are my top presets for After Effects in 2025. Download that project file if you want to browse it easily. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.