Head to Head: Adobe After Effects vs Adobe Animate

Full Video Transcript

Hello everyone, this is Jaren Smith from Noble Desktop and yes this will be recorded for replay. So if anyone is wondering, I actually am at my home in New Jersey and I'll be streaming from here. All of our recordings, all of our webinars are recorded so you can basically watch them whenever you want. Hopefully you'll want to watch them and enjoy it.

Basically what we're going to be looking at today is Adobe After Effects versus Adobe Animate. My name is Jaren Smith and if you're wondering, this is what I look like. I'm an animator, a designer, an aspiring filmmaker I guess, and I am actually the program director at Noble Desktop which is a software training company in New York City. Very possibly some of you have had me as an instructor before.

Overview of After Effects and Animate

Basically what we're going to look at today is Adobe After Effects versus Adobe Animate. I admit I called it After Effects versus Animate, but really what we have are two programs that have certain similar functions. It's not necessarily After Effects versus Animate all the time, sometimes After Effects and Animate.

We'll be looking at the history of the programs, we're looking at what they're currently intending to do, what they've done in the past, and then we'll be jumping into the programs and I'll be showing you some of the differences between them. There are situations where one is better than the other, there are other situations where you could probably use either program, and there are situations where you might want to use them together.

The History of After Effects

I've got gray hair, I'm a bit old actually, and I've been using After Effects and Animate for a very long time, each of them over 20 years or so at this point. Now After Effects is a bit older. It was created originally in 1993 by a company called CoSA, and then CoSA sold it to Aldus which was a software company. They originally made FreeHand and some other stuff, and then Aldus got bought by Adobe, and Adobe has had it for at this point more than 20 years.

After Effects was created in order to build animated graphics for television, so commercials, show opens, that sort of thing, lower thirds that you see in documentaries and news. That was what After Effects was built for, that's what it does very powerfully. I actually have a master's degree in communication arts, I studied broadcast design we called it at the time, and many years ago when I did my degree, After Effects was pretty much only used by people in television. That's it, no one else cared.

But over the last several decades that I've been working with the program and teaching it to other people, I've seen After Effects embraced by a really wide variety of people. We've got people who use it to create graphics for television still, people who create graphics for film. The opening titles for the Star Trek films, the new Star Trek films by Abrams, used After Effects plus some other stuff by the way. We've got people who use it to create graphics for social media, graphics for presentations, animated intros for YouTube, Vimeo, that sort of thing. So it's a really flexible program.

After Effects' Main Strengths

Now its two main uses are animation and compositing, combining multiple images together to create a new video. Major strengths of the program: very powerful and common motion graphics animation program, very good for video compositing, green screen removal, motion tracking, 3D camera tracking, that sort of thing. Really cool video effects and it can do a lot of really cool stuff, a very wide variety of things. It's like a Swiss army knife. I need to do a green screen? After Effects. I need to replace this screen of the phone in our video or the computer in my video? After Effects. I need to make an animated intro where things write themselves on? After Effects. Great tool.

If you've ever seen Archer, the FX show, their character animation is done in After Effects. If you've ever seen the Star Trek film Into Darkness, that's one of the new J.J. Abrams films, the UI animation and design was done there. All of those user interface screens they're using when they're moving things up and down, all the levers and stuff, that's After Effects. The hologram effects in Star Wars films? After Effects. So again, very popular program, very commonly used in television, and to be honest if you've ever watched a television show, if you've ever watched a video on social media, if you've ever had to watch an explainer video, it's probably done in After Effects.

The History of Adobe Animate

Now Animate is a little younger, three years younger by the way. It's like the younger sibling. It was originated in 1996. Currently we call it Adobe Animate or just Animate, but up until a few years ago it was called Flash Professional, Adobe Flash Professional. Prior to Adobe owning it, it was Macromedia Flash. When Adobe bought Macromedia they got Flash and Dreamweaver and other stuff. But before that, Macromedia didn't actually make it. It was the FutureSplash Player, and that was when it was created in 1996.

Honestly, it was originally created as a program to display small, mostly vector-based animations online. I think the FutureSplash Player's biggest client was Disney. They were using it for online animation. The original version didn't have a scripting language, didn't have code, it was basically a vector-based animation player.

Originally Animate, again FutureSplash, was a purely vector-based animation program. It made small files for displaying animation online. It was an alternative to Shockwave at the time, Shockwave technology which could make some really cool stuff but made really large files. So its goal was really small web-based files.

Flash's Evolution and Rebirth as Animate

Over the years when Macromedia got it, then Adobe got it, they started basically branching out to different things. You saw Flash being used to create entire websites, they had interactivity, they added code, you saw interactive games being made with it. It was really from its inception started off as a pure animation program, kind of like After Effects, but pretty rapidly became used as a platform for creating a wide variety of content: online presentations, games, that sort of thing.

The thing to keep in mind however is that it really did a wide variety of different tasks, that's one of the issues with it. You may remember that once the mobile devices became popular, iPhone especially, they didn't support Flash. Honestly, that was the death of Flash. The SWF player never really played very well on all devices, it just didn't work very well. That pretty much killed Flash, plus a couple other things by the way.

So Adobe had to repurpose it and that's what they're doing now. According to Adobe, you can use Animate to create interactive animations, games, TV shows, but mostly again web content. You can make cartoons, animated banners, avatars, that sort of thing.

Animate's Current Strengths

Animate is a two-dimensional vector animation program, that's its strength. It's very popular now because in the last couple of versions, while originally Flash was this multi-functional tool for creating a whole bunch of different things and honestly animation was only one of them, over the last several versions Animate has been purposefully retooled as a dedicated animation program specifically focused on cartoon animation. So you're looking at cartoon style, usually vector-based animation.

It's capable of frame-by-frame animation. Before I did my current degree, I was really heavily in animation. I studied animation, cell animation, we used to draw everything by hand. That is a very specific animation style that Animate is very capable of. It's got a wide range of drawing and painting tools, and you can output in a wide variety of formats. You can make interactive output if you wanted to make something that you could control: HTML5, WebGL, SWF. But if you just want to make a video, that's not a problem at all either.

Where is Animate used? If you've ever seen The Venture Brothers, the Adult Swim show, while most of the episodes are traditionally done in other software, the original pilot episode "The Terrible Secret of Turtle Bay" was actually animated in Flash. Ill Will Press was very well known in the big days of Flash for its "Neurotically Yours" webtoon series with Foamy the Squirrel, really cool animations. You've seen it a lot especially in web-based animations, but there have also been television shows that used Flash and Animate to create that product.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Looking at them side by side, they both do two-dimensional animation definitely. By two-dimensional animation I mean we can move things horizontally and vertically. Now After Effects has some limited 3D animation capabilities, Animate has even more limited 3D features.

After Effects' main strength is its raster, pixel-based effects. It's a stronger program for animating raster graphics or pixel-based graphics. It can do vector work, it definitely can, but most of what you see in After Effects is probably either video or photo-based and pixel-based. Animate's main strength, while it can handle pixel-based (called raster), is its vector work. It's basically always been a very strong vector animation program.

After Effects has 3D work, cameras and lights, animated cameras. Technically Animate has a camera, you can work very similarly with Photoshop and Illustrator layers. But that's when After Effects starts to pull away. After Effects has video compositing like green screen removal, motion tracking, camera tracking that you don't get in a dedicated animation program like Animate.

Choosing the Right Tool

If you're looking for a general all-purpose tool for working with video, and by working with video I mean compositing and animation, After Effects would be better for you. If you were looking for a dedicated animation program, especially if you're doing cartoon style animation, Animate may be better for you. And I'm saying "may" because there are television shows like Archer that do use After Effects for its animation.

When it comes to being able to create content, most After Effects content is created someplace else. You may have images that you bring in, video that you've shot, very often if you're working with graphics you'll have graphics made in Photoshop and Illustrator that you animate in After Effects. While you can do that in Animate, Animate also has some really pretty cool and advanced drawing tools.

If you're looking at animating characters, After Effects has very limited tools for character rigging and animation. It's not really the biggest part of that program, though there are add-ons that add to it. While Animate is made for character work, so it's got those built-in character rigging tools that you can use to animate your characters quickly.

Pricing and Software Plans

If you were interested in cost, because there's a lot of people who ask me about cost: if you only need After Effects or Animate, you can actually get either of those from Adobe. It's a subscription because that's how Adobe sells software now, for basically about $21 plus tax a month. If you want both of them and even more apps, then you can get the all apps plan for about $55 plus tax a month.

Depending on what you're doing, you may only need After Effects. Though usually what I would recommend, unless you're already going to get your graphics prepared for you, or if you're using Animate and only going to draw your graphics in Animate, you'll probably also need Photoshop and Illustrator for creating graphics. Personally, I use Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Cinema 4D, Animate to do whatever I do. They don't always work together, but when they do it actually comes out pretty well.

Working with Illustrator Files

For this example, I'm going to be working with basically three programs: Illustrator for creating my graphics, After Effects, and Animate. I'm basically going to jump back and forth between them. Unless you are going to draw all of your artwork in After Effects or Animate, you're probably going to need to create graphics someplace. Animate has stronger tools for creating artwork, but effectively After Effects has very few. It has like pen tools and basic shapes, so most things even if you're going to animate them are probably drawn someplace else.

This is Adobe Illustrator. If you're not familiar with it, Illustrator is a vector drawing program or a vector graphics program. What vectors are basically are little points in two-dimensional space connected by line segments. If you ever took like geometry in school, this is basically what graphics are. In Illustrator you can create basic shapes, you've got a pen tool for making more complex stuff, and you get a lot of options and controls including some text. You've also got tools for basically drawing kind of more realistic work.

Importing into After Effects

So how do they actually handle these files? Let's look at this. Each of these different objects is on a separate layer. Layers are basically ways of stacking up your content and isolating it. The saucer, saucer beam, sci-fi logo, text one, two, and three, and the background. There are individual layers. This file was made with two artboards. This artboard/double artboard behavior is because of how After Effects imports files. It's actually going to cause a problem for Animate, but we'll look at that too.

In After Effects, I can only have one project at a time. Both of these programs work very similar to each other in certain situations, but the key is once you get this stuff in, they actually do treat it differently. My goal is to make a little 1080 by 1080 ad for maybe Instagram. I've got some graphics, I've got some text, and I just want to basically animate the movement around to make it more interesting because just flashing static images is boring.

In this program I can actually import multiple files, I can import folders. The command is basically import. Now technically if I just bring this in, it imports what's called footage. That's basically the file, it is effectively flat, and I can't really move anything or work with it. No pieces.

Importing as a Composition

In After Effects I actually get choices for how things import, and I need to use them properly. Instead of footage which would give me basically a flat file, I'm going to bring it in as a composition. What's a composition in After Effects? A composition is the equivalent of a document in every other program. It's basically a layered file where you can animate everything. If you use video editing programs, it's the equivalent of a sequence. If you use any other program like Photoshop, Illustrator, or Animate, it's a bit like an actual document.

I'm going to actually turn this Illustrator file right into one, and it's going to give me all of those layers I had in Illustrator in the same position. Everything's going to look exactly like it did. I'm going to use "retain layer size," this makes the animation a little easier to work with. I'll double click on it and I can see here in my timeline each of those layers from Illustrator is now a separate piece.

Notice I had to actually make a special command in order to get these layers in. That's not bad, a little annoying, but once they're in, these pieces can be manipulated, adjusted, full control, no problem at all.

Limitations of Imported Files in After Effects

Keep in mind for the comparison between Animate and After Effects: in After Effects these are imported vector files, they actually are not independently editable. In Illustrator I had my little anchor points at the corners of the shapes, I could move them around with the tools in Illustrator. I can't do that here. Technically while they are based on those Illustrator files, they are not natively editable. Now if I want, I can right-click on it and I can turn them into editable vector, but the actual pieces that made this up are not controllable automatically.

Let's say that I wanted to change that background color to make it a gradient. I got a couple choices. The first is "Edit Original." This program makes a link to that imported file. I can use Edit Original and make my adjustment, take the file back to Illustrator, make my changes, save that, go back to After Effects, and it's updated. After Effects links to your imported files. Changing the original file will always update After Effects.

The problem is I change the original file. If I don't want to change the original file because maybe I'm using this file for multiple projects, Edit Original would still change it. So maybe that's not the best choice.

Using Effects in After Effects

If I can't edit the original because maybe I'm not allowed to change that file because we're using it for multiple projects, how would I do it here? In After Effects I'd add an effect to it, and this is the strength of After Effects. It has hundreds of effects in the application. I want to add a gradient to this layer, so I'll use the gradient ramp effect. I've got my background layer highlighted, I'll double click gradient ramp, and I get that black to white gradient.

I can sample the original color, adjust it, swap colors, and very quickly and easily make those adjustments. This is an effect applied to the imported layer, so it's not affecting the original. This is normally how I need to manipulate stuff in order not to have to use that Edit Original command.

One of the things I can't do without jumping through a few hoops is actually change the shape of things. There are some effects that'll warp it and adjust it, but if I really want to get in there and edit these individual pieces, I'm going to have to turn it into a native shape layer. Here's the other thing: that text is also not live text. This is not editable text anymore, here it's basically a picture of text. Keep these things in mind because when we open up Animate and do the same exact import, we're going to see how it's different.

Animating in After Effects

Let's say that I just want to animate this going around a little bit. I'm going to solo the saucer and the background because what I would usually do is basically animate the saucer first and animate the beam following along with it. I'm just going to want to animate the position and rotation of the saucer.

P for position, that's not bad I like that. And then I want to see rotation as well, so Shift+R to reveal rotation. One of the things to notice in After Effects is that the way animation works is that each property is animated independently, animated separately. These five properties—position, anchor point, rotation, opacity, and scale (P-A-R-T-S, that's how I remember it, "parts")—are built into every visual layer.

Any effects you add to layers also have properties that can be animated. That stopwatch—whenever you see this stopwatch, it means you can animate this property. So there's a lot of things we can animate here.

Creating Keyframes in After Effects

I want to have the saucer fly in from off screen and basically fly back and forth a couple times. Let's drag it off screen and I'm just going to make some keyframes. I'm going to rotate it a little bit. When I have a layer highlighted, I get a bounding box around it and I can use that to pull the layer and move it around. But if you're used to other Adobe programs, there's no rotation option for this feature. To rotate I have to adjust the value here or I can use the dedicated rotate tool. The keyboard shortcut for the rotate tool is W.

The timeline has a set length. If you use video editing programs or for that matter Animate, there's no set length in those programs. But After Effects compositions have a set length. In this program, once that stopwatch is turned on, keyframe creation is automatic. I go to 15 frames, drag this in, go back to my selection tool (keyboard shortcut V), drag it in like that, and a motion path shows me the direction of motion. That's nice.

Adding Easing to Animation

I can adjust the property to get the rotation a little different. I want to kind of slow it down as it goes in, so I'm going to grab those second two keyframes and I'm going to add what's called easing. It's basically going to give it a little slow down as it stops, because right now it kind of stops abruptly. I'm going to grab those two, right-click on them, Keyframe Assistant, and I'm going to add some easing, I'm going to ease in. So now when I preview, it slows down a little bit.

I'm thinking at that point is when I want the saucer beam to be visible, so I'm going to solo that as well. I'm going to adjust this so the saucer beam kind of lines up at the bottom of the saucer. I need to move the anchor point up here so it'll basically stay pivoted with the saucer.

The Pan Behind Tool and Specialized Tools

One of the things that's very interesting about After Effects is that it has really dedicated tools. If I want to move the anchor point, it's not the selection tool like in most other programs. I want to rotate it? It's not from the selection tool, it's the rotate tool specifically. So Animate, Photoshop, Illustrator, other programs like that aren't quite so specialized. There's a tool just for the anchor point called Pan Behind.

I've moved the anchor point up here, so I'm going to pivot right there. I go back to my rotate tool and now I can rotate. I'm actually going to want to move them up a little bit, so I'll grab both those layers and I'm going to drag them with my move tool. Oh look what happens—I make another keyframe by accident. In this program, the moment that stopwatch is turned on, keyframe creation is automatic, so it's very easy if you're not careful to make new extra keyframes.

How do I prevent that? I want to basically edit that keyframe. I'm going to drag my playhead, that little wedge, back to where the keyframes are and hold down Shift to snap right back to it. Now when I move the layers around, all it's doing is editing those two, so it's actually updating that keyframe.

Using the Linear Wipe Effect

I want to basically have the beam layer start right there so it doesn't even exist until the saucer stops. I don't want this to flash on, I want it to kind of fade in and angle. There's a lot of ways to do that—masks and other stuff—but there's actually an effect here called Linear Wipe. This is where you're going to see that After Effects has a lot of really quick tools for animation. All these hundreds of effects give you some really interesting features.

I'm going to angle that just like with the angle of the saucer visually following that. I'm going to make my transition completion about 50% so I can see the edge, then adjust it to make it more angled so it's coming at that angle. I'm going to feather this off a little bit to soften it.

Then I want to animate that. I want this to be hidden by default, so 100% transition completion. Stopwatch is on, change the value to 100, that's my keyframe. But I can't see my keyframes—there's a keyboard shortcut for that, U, it reveals keyframes. Then I'm just going to bring that down to zero percent and it wipes on.

Importing into Adobe Animate

Now let's look at Animate and see how it handles the files differently. One of the first things that's different: Animate has a ton of built-in tutorials to help you learn the program. In all honesty, After Effects has like three or four. The Animate team spent a lot of time coming up with tutorials to make it easy to learn this app. If you're interested, it's the Learn section of the welcome screen, and you can click on one and it will literally take you step by step to recreate the animation you see.

I'm going to create a new file. This is the equivalent of making the document in most other programs. I've got to determine what I'm using this for. This is where Animate shows that it's still intended to make a wide variety of things. After Effects makes animation and exports that animation almost exclusively natively as video. But Animate can output video, HTML5 content for web ads and banner ads, SWF files if you're using those still.

In After Effects I was able to have a project automatically, import the Illustrator file and have it create the composition for me right away. But in Animate I've got to make it first. It gave me a 1920x1080 workspace called a stage.

Animate's Interface and Tools

Animate is a little more similar to the other Adobe applications. Timelines are in the same place. Tools are a little different because in After Effects the tools were at the top right and there weren't that many tools. In Animate it's on the left like other Adobe programs, and I got a lot more tools. I've got selection tool, painting tools, the fluid brush (I love this one), the brush, the classic paintbrush, eraser, shape tools, lines, pen.

I've got a lot more tools here for making graphics, which again you didn't see in After Effects. Some of them you do have in both—basic shapes, pen, type, there is a paintbrush—but it's not as flexible as Animate's. What you'll find is that Animate's tools are much more flexible and really designed to make content. There are a lot of people who use Animate who create all their graphics entirely inside of Animate because of its wide range of drawing tools.

The Library Panel and Importing

In Animate you have a library. The library is basically where imported content goes. It's similar to the Project panel in After Effects where I had all of my assets visible, but not exactly like it. They are very similar to each other. This is the current version of the layout of Animate. It used to be different in the old days. They did make changes to Animate to make it look closer to After Effects, to make it a little easier for you to learn both, which I recommend.

I'm going to import. I've got some choices: import to stage, import to library, open external library, import video. Depending on the choice you make when you make a new project, if you chose one of the web-based ones for HTML5, I wouldn't be able to bring in video. But here I can. Import to stage is the command I want to use. Everything does end up in the library, but the main difference is import to stage will put a copy on the stage right away.

Detailed Import Options in Animate

Here's the main difference: I actually need to choose what comes in. These are the layers that were in Illustrator—saucer, saucer beam, sci-fi logo, everything else. I can actually open up each layer and see the individual content. I can basically control what comes in exactly. So I have a lot more nuanced control over what I've imported from Illustrator.

The integration between After Effects and Illustrator is good. The integration between Animate and Illustrator is far stronger. Animate was designed to pull in Illustrator files, it's got a lot more options. I can convert the layers to Animate layers, place at original position, set stage size to the same size as the Illustrator artboard.

Editable Content in Animate

Animate is a vector program, Illustrator is a vector program. It actually isn't linking to the file—it actually copied the content from Illustrator and makes it fully editable content right here. If I wanted to, I can change the color right from here, no problem at all. With my sub-selection tool, I can reshape stuff. All of the objects that were imported are editable.

The integration between Illustrator and Animate is very different. These are actually literally like copying and pasting the shapes from Illustrator directly in here, fully editable, fully controllable. And text from Illustrator comes in as text. I can change the font, it's live text. I didn't have these controls in After Effects. This is one of the major differences in how it imports Illustrator files.

Symbols in Animate

Are there things you can't do? Sure. For example, with the background, what if I wanted to lower the transparency? I can alter the transparency of the fill color, but there's no setting for alpha for transparency itself. There are also certain things shapes can't do. That's why creating symbols is very common—they give you more options.

Symbols are reusable objects. They have blending modes, filters you can add to them, and they can also be positioned in 3D space, which the shapes can't. Symbols are designed to be reusable objects. You can create symbols when you import Illustrator files or Photoshop files, or you can create them natively.

Animating in Animate: Keyframes and Tweens

Animation is very different here. First of all, there's no properties under the layer like you saw in After Effects. What I have are keyframes. In this program, keyframes hold animation properties. In After Effects, your individual properties are separate—position, rotation, scale can all be animated and get their own keyframes separately. But here, keyframes hold all the properties at once. So it's actually harder to animate individual things.

If I wanted to animate position, rotation, and scale all with their own keyframes all separately, Animate doesn't let you do that. The properties are all held together. It's a little harder to animate individual things at different rates, but it can still be done. This is one of the major differences that people get used to if they're going to be using both applications.

Here's the other thing: I've got different ways of making animation. In Animate you add what are called tweens to your keyframes, and there are three types: classic tween, motion tween, shape tween. It's not what they do that's different per se, it's what they apply to. I can't create a classic tween or motion tween on a drawing object, which is basically a shape. Shapes cannot have classic tweens or motion tweens applied—I'd have to convert it into a symbol. But shapes can be shape tweened.

Working with the Timeline in Animate

The program counts time in frames. Frames add up to make seconds, seconds make minutes, minutes make hours. The number of frames in a second is controlled by the frame rate. In this program, layers actually only exist as long as they have frames. So I have to add frames to keep things showing up. F5 is the keyboard shortcut to extend out that frame, that placeholder.

Movie clips don't actually play unless you test your movie. So movie clips, when it comes to pure animation, are actually kind of annoying to work with. Graphic clips do actually play on your timeline and have options for letting you control how they play—maybe you want to play the graphic on a loop, or just play once. Movie clips don't let you do that.

Classic Tweens and Easing

Now in After Effects when I animated, it animated automatically. In Animate I've got to tell it to tween. Classic tween is usually more reliable for traditional animation. Now I have that motion. If I want to update my keyframes, I simply go to that keyframe and make a change.

I think I want to add a little easing. I'm going to click on the keyframe and in my frame properties I've got easing options. I'm going to classic ease in, and I get a preview shape. I'm thinking I'm going to do quad. So now I get easing. The only issue is they're not individual properties, so they all are easing simultaneously at that point.

When to Use After Effects vs Animate

For a vector animation like this, it comes down a lot to your preference. If you've used Animate for a bit, maybe you find it easier to animate there. If you've used After Effects for a bit, maybe you find it easier there. But they have a lot of very similar options. The main confusion is tweens—the fact that the three different types of tweens work in different ways—and that keyframes in After Effects hold individual properties while in Animate keyframes hold multiple properties together at once.

Animate's Built-in Assets and Drawing Tools

One of the major advantages of Animate is that it actually comes with a variety of pre-built assets for you, which After Effects does not. For example, this asset I made called cartoon flame—when it plays, that's cartoon flame. They have a bunch of other assets, some are animated, some are not. They have pre-built animated assets you can use, also animated characters. These were made just by animating them and saving them as assets in the application. This reusable library that you can make content from is something that After Effects doesn't have.

This fire graphic was actually made with the tools in Animate, fully made here. This is the kind of thing that I can't do in After Effects—it doesn't have these tools for drawing and it also doesn't really intend to make frame-by-frame drawing content at all. Another one I made recently was an energy circle, a hand-drawn energy graphic. I drew the outline, filled in the colors in stages.

Frame-by-Frame Animation

If you want hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation because that's the look you want, then Animate is probably the better tool for you. It's not that one is always better than the other—there are certain situations where one has advantages over the other. If you're looking for more cartoony style stuff, if you're looking for a program where you can create your artwork, Animate will probably do that better.

If you are looking to work with video, if you're looking to do compositing, if you're looking to animate files from outside like Photoshop and Illustrator especially, After Effects may do that better.

After Effects' Strength: Effects and Compositing

Let me show you things that they are different at. This is an animation from a Photoshop graphic with video, these are 3D models, there's also some audio here with a heartbeat. These are 3D models. I have no particular easy way of getting these into Animate—I can export a video and use that to an extent, but I can actually import 3D models and work with them in After Effects.

My little 3D animated underwater world here is not really particularly easily possible in Animate. This is done in After Effects. While the graphics are all vector-based, all Illustrator, the movement of the camera, the lights creating shadows and moving shadows, and the depth of field effect are features specifically that After Effects has that Animate really doesn't. If I didn't need the light, if I didn't need the depth of field effect, I could do the same exact thing in Animate.

Expressions and Advanced Effects

One of the things that you have in After Effects is a scripting language, so I can basically code in animation so it can run forever. I'm going to hold down Option or Alt and click on the stopwatch, and that lets me put in an expression. I want this evolution to keep raising, so I'm going to say "time" (which is the time on the timeline) asterisk (multiply) and I'm going to say 100. So now what I have is a property that just keeps changing.

This is where After Effects jumps ahead of Animate—all of these built-in hundreds and hundreds of effects designed to reveal a layer or adjust the layer. All these pixel-based effects are really where After Effects jumps ahead and gives you a really big advantage. Animate's major strength, remember, is its character animation and its hand frame-by-frame hand-drawn animation.

Drawing Tools in Animate

The drawing tools in Animate—you've got to have a layer started. The first drawing mode, the default drawing mode, is called Merge Drawing mode. In Merge Drawing mode, your objects are individually selectable. The really interesting thing is that the fill and the stroke are actually different objects. If I drop something over it and deselect it, they automatically merge together, hence Merge Drawing mode.

Object Drawing mode was designed to mimic the way Illustrator works. These actually function like Illustrator files, the stroke and fill are editable together. Most programs have those basic shapes, but what Animate really has are the brushes. These are the really cool things.

The Fluid Brush and Classic Brush

There's a fluid brush and a classic brush. The classic brush is the older brush in the program. The fluid brush is designed to take advantage of your graphics card, so it basically renders better and has a few more options. With stabilizer, it smooths it off. Curve smoothing rounds off everything, which is nice. I've got angle, taper, and my pressure enabled, so I can basically draw.

Those are the fluid brush dynamics, and I can save any of these options as a preset. It has a lot of options for how the tool itself works. The classic brush has additional choices like different brush heads and shapes. The major difference is that it doesn't run as fast because it's not using the video card to speed it up, and some things like pressure work a little differently.

Export Options

There is actually an export option from After Effects to save a GIF file—you have to use Media Encoder to make it. But from Animate, it's literally just an export command right there. I can also export video from either one. After Effects is really intended to export video, so most of its native export commands are video. There are actually some really cool add-ons that will give you additional export choices.

If you're outputting video, they'll both do that. If you're outputting a GIF, native command right from Animate, After Effects has a few more hoops to jump through. If you wanted to make interactive content for the web, like for social media interactive elements or for HTML5 ads, then Animate will export that while After Effects has no way to do it.

Conclusion and Resources

A lot of times it depends on what you need to make and what the content needs to look like. They've really been pushing Animate to create cartoon-style graphics. If you look at the characters they give us, there's a whole bunch of cartoon characters included. That's really been what they've been pushing for the last several versions—cartoon-style animation for creating both webtoons and stuff for television.

My name is Jaren Smith, I was here today for Noble Desktop. You can reach us through our website nobledesktop.com. I hope you've enjoyed our lesson. All of our webinars are available for free replay. I believe it takes maybe an hour or two for YouTube to process it, but you should definitely be able to check it out. I'm also doing another webinar tonight on After Effects versus Premiere Pro, because we find there's a lot of confusion about the uses of those two applications as well. Thank you everyone, have a good day.