Adobe Premiere Pro CC - Essentials Training

What is the difference between After Effects & Premiere Pro

Daniel Walter Scott

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A question that comes up a lot is, "What is the difference between Premiere Pro and After Effects?" If you already know the answer you can skip this video, if you're unsure, stick around. 

Basically Premiere Pro is video editing, and After Effects is special effects. So Premiere Pro would be something you'd use, if you are going to make a how-to video, like this one, okay? If you are making a commercial, a documentary, a feature film, I can't think of anything else, but it's all to do with taking footage from a camera, generally, and doing cuts, doing transitions, doing some basic color correction, fixing the audio, and then sending it on its merry way. 

After Effects on the other hand is all about motion graphics, and kinetic type, and if your logo needs to spin in, and spin around and catch fire for no good reason, that is After Effects. Let me show you a couple of examples just to make it crystal clear. 

All right, a good example of what After Effects does is, kind of their-- their own website, you can see in the background here, the types of things that gets used. You can see kind of cool transitions and intro videos. There is special effects, a laser car, some-- just-- interesting, okay, special effects, but I feel like there is another side to After Effects, the side that I do more of. It's more like motion graphics, see this intro here, there's something similar to the beginning of these videos. There's a bit of camera work going on, and some zooming, and some, kind of animated graphics, you can see me interacting with, it's here, that's After Effects. 

So more-- I do kind of more-- you can kind of see, motion graphic style stuff, animated infographics is what this course is, if you want to do After Effects, check out that, but there's a lot of cool stuff you can do like this in After Effects. 

Other things that are quite cool, with more motion graphics, where, yeah, it's kind of more design style animations. You can kind of see all of this type stuff. Yes, there is After Effects, and Premiere Pro, let me show you some of-- let me show you an example. So this is one of the examples from the course that we're going to do. It's a short documentary on Parkour, and basically you can see in the footage here, is a bunch of mp4s I've recorded on a camera, there's some audio, and we combine it together to tell a story in the timeline over here. 

Let's play it through, "When I first started doing Parkour, it was five years ago, and, there's a bit of interview in the background, we cut between a few different videos, "…watching videos, and blowing my mind, that some people can jump so far, and do some awesome tricks." - Wait for it. "I realize that there's no limits, all limits are… we fade in such dramatic music. Hah, look at that. 

So yeah, Premiere Pro, documentaries, commercials, YouTube videos, how-to videos, anything that does videos, Premiere Pro is really good at doing it quickly, and outputting it quickly. Freaks out for special effects, does some stuff. We're going to do special effects in here, but After Effects freaks out at doing this kind of editing in front of us, but loves doing all the special effects. 

Can you get away with using Premiere Pro without After Effects? Totally; Premiere Pro does a lot of the simple stuff, that you want to do in terms of special effects. It's just the more hardcore stuff you might have to jump out into After Effects. 

All right, that's it, Premiere Pro, video editing, After Effects, special effects. Let's actually start one of our projects.