I’ve been using After Effects for nearly 30 years, and over that time I’ve worked on a wide range of projects across many different fields. But one thing I haven’t done a lot of is interact with other After Effects users online. I posted my first tutorial on the Creative Cow website in 2002, but after joining the ProVideo Coalition in 2009 I haven’t really hung out on forums.

Recently, I’ve started browsing the After Effects channel on Reddit, and I’ve found it interesting to look through the various posts and see what problems are facing other users. And what I’m seeing is that many questions aren’t to do with specific, one-off issues related to After Effects, but instead tap into fundamental VFX techniques that have been around for many years.

So that brings us to this new series, which I’m calling Guru Meditations. It will mostly be prompted by random Reddit posts that make me perk up and think “Hey, I could talk about that for hours…”

It seems fitting that this first article should be a reflection on the After Effects tutorial that made the biggest impact on me, sometime back in the early 2000s. It was on the Creative Cow, where I also began posting tutorials, but unfortunately a lot of those early posts are no longer there.  It demonstrated how tracking and then reverse-tracking could be used to make rotoscoping much easier.

It totally blew my mind, and I hope there are After Effects users out there who find my tutorials to be as influential as I found that one.

But even though the techniques outlined here date back a couple of decades, the underlying concept is still valid – and the approaches outlined in this video are still the answer to many problems that users face when doing vfx, roto and cleanup work.

While this video is more of a history lesson than a step-by-step tutorial, it mentions an earlier tutorial I made on how to do screen replacements with Syntheyes.  That video is a step-by-step guide on how to do advanced screen replacements, and the techniques it goes through are just as valid for other types of VFX as well. I originally made it just after Boris FX purchased Syntheyes, and there’s always the potential for them to bundle some form of Syntheyes with After Effects in the future. Fingers crossed!

Hopefully this is a the first in a series where I look back, reflect and share almost 3 decades of experience. If you’ve found yourself here from somewhere else – maybe even Reddit! – then please take the time to check out my other articles and tutorials