Cool Video Effects in Premiere Pro & After Effects

by Katelynn Mitchell
Read time: 3 min
1770
Posted 15 February 2021
Summary

If you want become a video editor, there’s no easy shortcut: success will lie in a lot of determination, hard work and perseverance over time. Having said that, there are a few easy wins that you might be missing out on.

The cool video effects on this list are all staples of modern music videos, TV shows and big budget movies, but they’re more easily achievable using the best video editing software like After Effects and Premiere Pro than you might think. These tutorials walk you through each of these cool video effects in turn, quickly and concisely, and you’ll soon be adding strobe flicker effect, infinite zoom, glowing footsteps and more to your own video projects. 

1. Strobe Flicker Effect

Although it requires a clear warning for people suffering epilepsy beforehand, the strobe-style flicker is one of those cool video effects you often see in modern music videos, typically at the point when a beat drops. There are multiple ways to achieve this effect, but the approaches presented in this video by Steven Van is one of the easiest to achieve in Premiere Pro. The entire video is less than four minutes long, so that conveys how straightforward this technique is.

2. Glowing Footsteps

Glowing footsteps is another fun and eye-catching effort you see in a lot of music videos right now. And in this 17 minute video, VFX artist Ignace Aleya outlines one method of creating them. His technique involves using Mocha, a tracking tool that comes bundled with After Effects, and he’s generously provided all the assets he uses in the tutorial to make it easier to follow at home.

3. Flash FX

One of our favorite video effects is the Flash Effect. It is always in trend for certain types of videos and often used in professional cinema and Hollywood movies. Those are harder to make and sometimes require drawing by hand to make it look unique and creative. If you dont want to spend time drawing it, there are bundles of already pre-made Flash Effects, that you can use for your projects. Simple ones you can find and download for free, but if you want a professional look you might want to check out something like this Flash FX Package

4. Bend Water

Bending water, seemingly by the power of your mind, is one of those cool video effects you'd only expect to see in a big-budget movie like Avatar: The Last Airbender. But as this 13 minute tutorial from ProductionCrate shows, you can create it yourself in After Effects, and you should have a whole heap of fun doing so. The team walk you through everything from shooting with a water wand to different ways to create your displacement maps, and you can even download free visual and audio assets for your own projects.

5. Bullet-time

One of the most famous special effects of all time, ‘bullet time’ gives the impression of detaching the time and space of a camera from those of its visible subject. It first appeared in the Matrix movies, when the main character Neo leant back as bullets floated around him in slow motion. This eight-minute video by Premiere Gal shows you how to create this kind of 360 view using just one camera and Premiere Pro. She walks you through the entire process, from filming herself jumping off a trampet to the final post-processing of the scene, and the results are surprisingly eye-catching.

This article was partially taken from Creativebloq
Original header photo

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