Free Tools for After Effect Editors

The following article covers the top Free After effects scripts, plugins as well as software that is commonly used together with After Effects. All products listed below can be downloaded for free or at your own price. When prompted with “choose your own price”, you can simply type in zero and download at no charge, or you could write in a higher amount if you have the financial means to support the creator.

Blender

Blender is a free and open-source 3D creation suite with powerful tools for modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, and generally anything found in the 3D pipeline which even  includes game creation. Many video editors will use blender to create 3d objects and then import them into After Effects for further editing, overall resulting in a nice workflow between the two softwares.

FXconsole

FX Console is a free After Effects workflow script developed by Video Copilot. The script provides a user-friendly interface for quickly browsing through, previewing, and applying effects, presets, and expressions, overall improving a users workflow efficiency by reducing the time spent searching through menus and layers. In dummy terms, less clicks and eyeballing the screen when applying an effect or preset.

OminoSuite

The Omino Suite provides a collection of visual effects inside Adobe After Effects overall expanding a users capability. These effects can be used to generate complex patterns, designs, dynamic particle effects, apply advanced color grading and correction, add stylized distortions, glitches, transformations, and so much more!

Saber

Saber is a visual effects plugin for Adobe After Effects developed by Video Copilot. It allows users to create customizable and realistic lightsaber effects inspired by the Star Wars movies. With Saber, users can adjust blade appearance, color, intensity, and motion to achieve various lightsaber effects depending on what the user is trying to achieve. Saber is a popular and user-friendly tool for VFX editors.

Displacer Pro

The displacement map inside of After Effects is one of the most versatile tools at our disposal as compositors and motion designers, however for one reason or another it can only displace by translation which is where Displacer Pro comes in. Displacer Pro is a free plugin that lets users displace with translation, rotation, and scale along with all your favorite modes such as hue, saturation, luma, gamma, softness, and easing.

FlowFrames

FlowFrames is a simple but powerful software that utilizes advanced AI frameworks to interpolate videos in order to increase their framerate in the most natural looking way possible. In more simple terms, many editors will run their footage through Flowframes before editing them, overall increasing the fps resulting in a smoother look. Flowframes is often paired with twixtor and time remapping.

VC Color Vibrance

VC Color Vibrance is an intense and bright colorization plugin brought to you by Video Copilot. The plugin allows users to add hot colorization with ease and create alpha channels (unmultiply). The plugin also works on pre-matted footage and eliminates faded colors when using mask feathering.

NESLayers

NESLayers is a simple script designed by Nessu that can make your workflow much more efficient. The script allows you to create trimmed adjustment layers, null layers, solid layers and cinematic borders with the click of a button. The script also includes the ability to create one frame adjustment layers so you’ll never have to manually trim your extra layers again. Simply select the layer you want to add to, and click one of the buttons to create a layer that matches the duration of the original.

VC ORB

VC Orb is a powerful and free plugin designed to create 3D spheres and orbs within After Effects. Unlike the basic sphere effect in After Effects, VC Orb offers a more realistic 3D shading and mapping. It’s often used for creating planets in space scenes, logos, abstract visuals, or any other element where a 3D sphere is needed.

Duik

Duik is a powerful After Effects script that is commonly used for rigging various components of character designs in order to create the cleanest animation possible with said character. Duik is often used together with the built in puppet tool as they both compliment each other’s strong suits. Additionally, Duik can save you from having to write out complex expressions yourself.

EasyCopy

EasyCopy is an After Effects Script that lets you copy and paste your eases without overwriting your values as well as copy and paste your values without overwriting your eases. If you like to manually adjust your eases with the graph editor, this tool is for you!

Twixtor Assistor

Twixtor Assistor assists users with frame interpolation within After Effects, specifically catered to those who use the Twixtor plugin Twixtor or the standalone software Flow Frames, overall making the process a bit easier and less time consuming for users.

AMVtool

AMVtool is a software for encoding an recontainering, for and by the AMV community though not limited to. After torrenting your first movie or episode you’ll notice that the files are in .mkv format which After Effects and other softwares don’t support, however with AMVtool you can easily convert your footage to .mp4 so you can then import and edit them respectively. AMVtool is arguably better at maintaining quality and faster at doing it’s job when compared against competitors.

Handbrake

HandBrake is an open source software that is used for video transcoding and conversion. It allows users to convert video files from one format to another, making them compatible with different devices and platforms. Handbrake is often used as a free alternative for Media Encoder.