After Effects gives me total control over my vision, without the usual editing headaches. Even though the interface felt like a spaceship cockpit at first, the step-by-step tutorials had me making cool things right away without losing my mind. The workflow feels like a motion-focused version of Photoshop, and it lets me fine-tune every single millisecond of movement so I can build exactly what I’m picturing. On top of that, the seamless link with Premiere Pro is a huge time-saver: if I notice a typo, I can fix it immediately without the nightmare of rendering, exporting, and re-importing everything all over again. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
After Effects has a frustrating dark side that often undercuts its creative power. It has an infuriating habit of crashing at random for no apparent reason—even on high-end computers—which leaves me nervously hitting Save every couple of minutes just to avoid losing work. On top of that, it relentlessly chews through hard drive space with massive background cache files that can easily swallow 100 GB unless I’m constantly hunting them down and clearing them out.
I also deeply resent the subscription model, because it feels like I’m paying endless rent just to access my own creativity—and the moment I stop paying, I’m locked out of my own projects. And if I try to use it for standard video or audio editing, it turns into a complete nightmare: playback lags, tracks drift out of sync, and it becomes painfully obvious it’s built for special effects, not for simply cutting clips together. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.