Video Production Automation.

Digital video editing and video production is more complicated than you might think. Even though you can film video without getting into a lot of editing or graphics work, it is possible to do more sophisticated effects that require a lot of technical skills.

After Effects

While studying After Effects I found many opportunities to put my developer skills to use in video production. The Professional version of After Effects supports scripting. Using JavaScript, you can automate the process of creating a new composition with text layers. You can programmatically create keyframes and set properties for a large number of objects making it possible to create complicated animations that would be too time consuming to create manually.

Expressions

After Effects also has Expressions, a JavaScript based scripting language for modifying parameters based on other parameters. This can be used to coordinate changes in parameters so you can tie the scaling of an object to its rotation.

Plug Ins.

Then there are After Effects plug-ins that make it possible to pull in text from external sources for titling and plug-ins for creating animated charts based on your current data.

Vector Graphics.

After Effects works best with vector graphics. Vector graphics can be used to create mask shapes, track mattes, and stencils. They can also be converted into 3D objects. In order to create vector graphics for video you need to learn Adobe Illustrator and master its many pen tools for creating paths. There are also other vector graphic formats like SVG and WMV which can be converted to AI files.