Upgrade your After Effects toolkit without breaking the bank! Explore our top picks for 5 useful Adobe After Effects plugins under $100.
Even with its impressive built-in capabilities, features, and effects, there’s always room to further enhance your Vanilla copy of Adobe After Effects. And that’s where plugins come in.
With After Effect’s extensive plugin ecosystem, you can add tons of additional features and functionality that will help take your visual projects to new heights.
While some plugins may come with a huge price tag, it’s good to know that there are also affordable options that deliver exceptional value without breaking the bank.
In this blog post, we’ve listed 5 useful After Effects plugins that cost under $100. These affordable plugins offer a great return on investment for both professional and beginner After Effects users.
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1. Autokroma AfterCodecs
Autokroma AfterCodes is an After Effects plugin that gives you additional export formats like H.264, H.265, ProRes, and many more. These codecs ensure outstanding video quality and lightweight files.
The plugin uses FFmpeg for encoding H.264 and H.265 for better and faster compression. Some of the other improvements you’ll notice with Autokroma AfterCodes are:
- Videos with lower bitrates will be of much better quality than before.
- You can save time by directly rendering in the After Effects render queue without complex command lines or large temporary files.
- ProRes rendering with Autokroma AfterCodes is 15% faster than QuickTime.
A huge advantage of using the Autokroma AfterCodes After Effects plugin is that it completely eliminates the use of Adobe Media Encoder and QuickTime for rendering H.264/H.265 and ProRes respectively.
Compatibility Adobe After Effects CC 2014 and above versions Price $89
2. Blace – AI Face Detection & Blurring
Blace is a face detection and blurring plugin for After Effects that uses Artificial Intelligence to automatically detect and blur faces in your scenes. If a scene has multiple faces but you only want to blur a few, then you can use the masking control feature to exclude the ones you don’t want to blur.
There are several customization options to control the blur style, intensity, and size. You can blur the whole face or just the eyes.
Blace has 2 versions – CPU based and GPU based. If you have a CUDA-accelerated GPU, then the GPU version of the Blace plugin will give you faster results. If not, then you can use the CPU one but the results will be much slower. The functionality of both versions remains the same.
Compatibility Adobe After Effects CC 2021 and above versions Price $59.99
3. Composite Brush
While it is super easy to key out the green or blue screen in After Effects, it is much more difficult to key out other colors. That’s where the Composite Brush After Effects plugins come to the rescue.
With this plugin, you can easily select any color in your footage and instantly remove it, pulling a successful key.
Using the plugin is quite easy. You just need to click and drag on the color you want to remove, and then Alt + click and drag the color you want to keep, Composite Brush will then automatically and precisely remove the selected color.
Composite Brush can also be used to change color or objects in a scene. You can click on any object to select its color, then use the built-in transfer modes to key and change to any color of your choice.
Compatibility Adobe After Effects CC 2019 and above versions Price $99.99
4. AE Face Tools
Face Tools is a face tracking and replacement plugin for After Effects that lets you add face features, filters, and props. It includes hundreds of ready-to-use presets that can be applied with a single click.
The plugin is easy to use. You can create a circular mask on a face and click on the Track Mask button in the plugin UI panel to track the motion. Once the tracking is done, you can select any preset for the library to apply on the face.
Moreover, the presets will automatically set their scale and alignment based on the face shape, size, and other features.
AE Face Tools is one of the best and most widely used face tracking and replacement After Effects plugins that you can get for under $100.
Compatibility Adobe After Effects CC 2018 and above versions Price $45
5. ScaleUp
ScaleUp is an After Effects plugin that is capable of enlarging videos by 10 times. It uses AI-powered technology to study and analyze the pixels of videos using a neural network to improve quality and reduce noise.
In simple words, you can increase your video resolution while still preserving all the essential details.
ScaleUp has a simple and user-friendly interface where you can control the amount of sharpness you want to add the noise to remove. Then comes the Type option where you get 2 choices- Sharp and Cartoon.
The Sharp mode provides better perceptual quality with details to make videos look more realistic. The Cartoon mode is ideal for upscaling cartoon videos as it preserves and enhances edges as well as removes compression artifacts.
Compatibility Adobe After Effects CC 2018 and above versions Price $59.99
Also, check-out:
- 50 Best After Effects Plugins & Scripts
- 20 Keyframe Assistant Plugins For After Effects
- 5 Best Motion Tracking Plugins For After Effects