If you’re a motion designer, you’ve probably got a custom toolkit of third-party tools, plugins, scripts, and setups unique to you. The big appeal of them is time-saving—whether enabling you to achieve a look without a huge amount of effort, or to make quick projects that much quicker. Over the years I’ve assembled a kit that I pretty much always install on a new machine immediately, in no particular order. Most of these come from AEScripts, which is a pretty smashing site if you’re looking for After Effects mods.
- Ease and Wiz: The simplest way to get motion keyframe style in a click or two. Especially when I just need to animate things quickly or don’t have time to massage keyframes for a bespoke effect, this fills in nicely.
- True Comp Duplicator: After Effects’ composition duplication is in my opinion a bit non-intuitive, and on complicated projects with multiple nested compositions True Comp Duplicator saves oodles of time.
- Reposition Anchor Point: A fantastically simple and fantastically important part of my workflow: I have no idea how much time I’ve saved with this far-more-intuitive method of dynamically changing anchor points of objects, but whatever it is, I probably owe the developer a lot of money.
- Unmult: A really simple plugin from RedGiant that like Reposition Anchor Point, saves me a ton of time by knocking out black pixels and not requiring any blending modes to do it.
Looking at my AEScripts purchase history, I’ve been relying on some scripts and plugins I use weekly for more than seven years at this point. The amount of time they’ve saved me is probably incalculable, as is the new approaches they’ve enabled me to try.