At college, you’ll be using Adobe Premiere CC to edit your movies. It’s a great bit of software, but unless you’re really into putting huge amounts of time into experimenting, you’ll find there’s some things that you just can’t do.
That’s where After Effects comes in – After Effects [AE] can be thought of as Photoshop for Video. AE is full of all kinds of tools for manipulating footage, or parts of your footage, adding things in, and taking things out.
In order to get off to the best start with AE though, observe the number one rule;
We don’t use AE to edit our movie. We use AE to edit a shot in our movie.
We will work on a shot-by-shot basis, and when our shot has been treated in After Effects, we’ll add it back into Final Cut or Premiere for final edit.