If you want to buy Adobe After Effects, the chances are you already know its strengths. But knowing the best way to buy it can be harder than rotoscoping a shark from a video excerpt. And if you know what rotoscoping is, then After Effects is probably for you!
Adobe After Effects isn’t just for video editors producing movies. It can be used to add dynamic elements to your graphic designs or social media posts. With Adobe’s subscription-only business model, there are a couple of things for you to think about when deciding how to buy Adobe After Effects. So here’s a quick guide.
| Annual Subscription |
Annual Subscription
$239.88
|
| Annual Subscription Paid Monthly |
Annual Subscription Paid Monthly
$20.99
|
| Monthly Subscription |
Monthly Subscription
$31.49
|
| Best For |
Best For
Adding stunning effects to your video and graphics
|
The most cost-efficient way to buy Adobe After Effects is to pay for a year up-front. If you want to pay in installments, there’s a $1 per month surcharge. And the penalties for canceling early are big enough to make it not worth trying to game the system.
If you don’t know for sure that you’ll get value from the app, then a month-by-month subscription is available. But with an additional cost of $126 per year, it’s not the best long-term solution.
As with all Adobe’s creative solutions, there are two ways of saving money. And they both involve subscribing to the Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps option.
As you can see, being a student or teacher really pays off. An All Apps subscription will cost you less than the normal monthly charge on After Effects alone. For the rest of us, the All Apps subscription makes sense if you want three or more of the 21 Creative Cloud offerings.
A sometimes-overlooked benefit of this is that it allows you to use one of the apps occasionally. For example, you might have no regular use for Adobe Illustrator. But for one particular project, you want to create a unique font. With the Creative Cloud subscription, you can easily do that, even if you don’t touch the app again for months.
There’s no doubt, though, that for non-education users, it’s a sizeable chunk of money every month. But for many, it is literally the cost of doing business.
| Annual Subscription |
Annual Subscription
$599.98
|
| Annual Subscription Paid Monthly |
Annual Subscription Paid Monthly
$54.99
|
| Monthly Subscription |
Monthly Subscription
$82.49
|
| Education Monthly Subscription |
Education Monthly Subscription
$19.99
|
| Best For |
Best For
Saving money on three or more apps
|
Adobe After Effects is one of the most powerful tools available for dynamic image and graphic manipulation. You can use it to animate text in a number of ways, including 2D and 3D. And these creations can be delivered to Adobe Premiere Pro for the video editor to work with without requiring further alterations.
After Effects’ VFX tools let you remove unwanted elements from a scene in post-production. And they even let you add weather effects and produce composite 3D fly-throughs. Not to mention using your Illustrator assets or applying the Character Animator Project to your animations.
Your After Effects subscription also gives you 100 GB of cloud storage. This is especially helpful for allowing teams to work together or freelancers to share their work with the commissioning client. You might not feel the need to create your own fonts. That’s fine because you get access to more than 20,000 fonts in the Adobe Fonts library. And all are licensed and ready to use.
Like all the apps in the Creative Cloud, there are extensive online and in-app tutorials. Not to mention the myriad tutorials available online, both paid and free.
It’s possible that Premiere Pro or Apple’s Final Cut Pro might have all the after effects you need. In this case, you’re unlikely to get value for money from Adobe After Effects. But it is easy to see how you might want to combine it with Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Audition. This combination gives you tremendous creative power. And it would be the obvious choice with the All Apps subscription.
