After Effects Tools – #006

Enhance your animation within After Effects with our recently adopted favourite tools.

Rift panel

Rift

Rift is a tool from Michael Delaney that allows you to shift layers in the timeline to help stagger or offset the animation of a group of layers. You can choose whether to affect layers before or after the time slider, as well as whether to affect a layer’s in/ out point. It can also be used to align layers or randomly scatter them within a given time range. The UI can initially be intimidating but stick with it and it’s very useful for efficiently creating animation that looks less linear or for quickly managing a wide array of layers.

TextBorder

TextBorder is a simple but great plug-in from Plugin Everything that allows you to quickly create a text box around a text layer. It automatically updates as you change the text and provides options for the border colour, thickness and allows you to add dashes and gradients too.

Network Clipboard

Working in a team has been made even easier thanks to the ability to copy and paste assets quickly between team members across the network. Network Clipboard allows you to transfer particular compositions, keys or layers across a network, or a shared online drive, so that you can recreate a particular style or effect in seconds.

We used this on a recent project for Verizon Connect (shown below) to share assets within a team to save time and avoid any duplicated effort when creating similar content across multiple compositions.